


When the Truth Hunts You Down

by Myria83



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angel Wings, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, BAMF Chloe Decker, BAMF Lucifer, BAMF Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Blood and Injury, Ella Lopez & Lucifer Morningstar Bonding, Ella Lopez & Lucifer Morningstar Friendship, Everyone Needs A Hug, F/M, Hurt Lucifer, Hurt/Comfort, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Devil Reveal, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Gets a Hug, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Needs A Hug, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Whump, Post-Devil Face Reveal to Chloe Decker, Post-Episode: s03e24 A Devil of My Word, Post-Season/Series 03 AU, Protective Lucifer, Protective Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Protective Trixie Decker, Trixie Decker & Lucifer Morningstar Bonding, Trixie Decker & Lucifer Morningstar Friendship, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2020-02-27 20:46:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18746797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myria83/pseuds/Myria83
Summary: "The light of my stars and the darkness of space, the heat of their cores and the cold void between them... Desire and punishment, free will and chains, the faint echo of Heavenly choirs and the deafening roar of Infernal hordes... I yearned to be whole, but I was disintegrating, crumbling, and if I couldn’t make sense of the contradictions that were tearing me apart, a bunch of humans couldn’t possibly handle them.""When the Truth Hunts You Down" by Sam Tinnesz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKKlshytcpc





	1. Way Down We Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JustCallMeEmrys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustCallMeEmrys/gifts), [Hircine_Taoist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hircine_Taoist/gifts), [Tavalah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tavalah/gifts).



> I've published several short stories, novels and essays in my own country, but English is not my native language, and this is the very first fan fiction I write. If something doesn't sound right, you're welcome to point it out so that I can fix the mistake... Thank you in advance!

  

“They used to call the devil the father of lies. But for someone whose sin is meant to be pride, you'd think that lying would leave something of a sour taste. So my theory is that when the devil wants to get something out of you, he doesn't lie at all. He tells you the exact, literal truth. And he lets you find your own way to hell.”

― Mike Carey

  

 

When it happened, I thought a bomb had gone off. My cop instincts kicked in, and before I knew it, me and Ella were crouching against the nearest wall. I shielded her with my body, suffocating her shriek.

Feeling the rush of adrenaline and a shiver climbing up my spine, I shushed her, putting two fingers on her lips. I instinctively went for the holster of my gun; even the “click” the snap of the thumb break made when I disengaged it seemed loud, in the thick silence following the deafening crash on the other side of the open-plan living room. That same silence told me that despite the damage, the penthouse of the Art Deco skyscraper facing LA’s busiest boulevard hadn’t been hit by a rocket launcher: nothing had actually _explode_ _d_ , on the other side of the stone wall we were hiding behind. A cannonball straight from the 15th century or a military drone were the two best guesses I could come up with for a solid object pulverizing reinforced, multi-layered glass without engulfing the entire apartment in a raging inferno. Quite far-fetched, to say the least.

Holding my breath, I gestured for Ella to stay where she was while I figured out how to get closer and take a quick look without giving away our presence. Gun loaded and leveled at whatever the hell had trashed the top floor of the den of sin towering over West Hollywood, I spared our prisoner a glance only because he still had beans to spill: he was still there in the bedroom, trying and failing to turn his head towards the noise, tied to the antique armchair we had found under the massive bookcases climbing up to the ceiling of the mezzanine floor.

Charlotte had already lost her life in that total and utter clusterfuck; the human stain tied to that chair had tried to kill me right after, then sent Chloe and her partner straight into a trap. I’d heard the gunshots on the phone and I didn’t even know if they could hold on until the SWAT team I’d sent there showed up to save the day. I was too far to make it there in time: I could only pray for their safety.

That weirdo my ex-wife had ended up stuck with had grown on me over the years, but after discovering that he had been in the know the whole fucking time, I needed him alive just for the sheer delight of shoving all that biblical bullshit back down his throat and drowning him in his own nonsensical “metaphors”.

I heard a crushing noise on the other side of the bulky, engraved “Sumerian” (or whatever) walls, probably some movie prop from a set a few blocks down the boulevard. Someone or something was moving on the debris; careful not to put myself in the line of fire and ready to face whatever shit was about to go down, I climbed a step and stuck my head inside the bedroom to take a peek. Barrow was very still, now, as if he felt something ominous looming right behind him, on the other side of the opaque glass wall standing between him and the adjacent living room. He met my gaze, then looked at the muzzle of my gun, but he didn’t have the chance to open his mouth before my dilated pupils went to a shadow slowly rising behind his back, and my gun instantly trained on it instead, without crossing the threshold of the nonexistent door.

A couple footsteps approaching on the shattered glass, slow and deliberate, the strange rustle of something big dragging through the debris, and a heavy breath, almost a thunderous growl, that I could feel reverberating in my bones. Then a sickening wet sound… The drip and the coppery scent I knew far too well, ‘cause I’d seen my fair share of gruesome crime scenes.

The vaguely human-shaped silhouette on the other side of the frosted glass wall chose that same moment to change into something different: it grew bigger, as if some sort of prop or backdrop was being lifted behind it... A moving, seemingly _alive_ and apparently _glowing_ sort of “prop”.

Whatever that thing was, it almost made me scream in terror when it suddenly rose and flailed the glass like murderous whip: a sudden strike cut right through it, with an ear-splitting noise I found myself literally recoiling from. Neatly sliced on a diagonal, half of it slid and crashed in slow motion to the floor, exploding in myriad fragments. I instinctively pulled back and hid behind the corner, almost stumbling over Ella who (kudos to her) hadn’t made a sound.

The one who choked up after letting out a startled shriek was the man no longer alone in that room.

I _saw_ what emerged from the other side of the destroyed glass wall, hovering just over the sharp edge in an elegant gesture before dropping to seize the hitman’s shoulder in a vicious grip. I got a glimpse of it before hiding, but I couldn’t make sense of the afterimage.

No human hand stopped the prisoner’s self-imposed stillness from morphing abruptly into a writhing fit. No _living_ human’s. What emerged with snake-like swiftness from the sharp remnants of the glass wall moved faster than my eyes could follow, but it was the limb of a _corpse_ : drenched in fresh blood oozing from a white double cuff fastened with otherwise impeccable links, it was straight out of a nightmare. Such a thing could only belong to a body burnt at the stake or skinned alive.

As a homicide cop I had seen my fair share of dead people and horribly abused victims, and what I knew for sure was that whoever that hand belonged to, he should have been screaming in agony, dropping unconscious on the floor or lying lifeless and cold on the steel table of a morgue. Moving with such an injury would be unthinkable for the most resilient, tough human being, let alone doing it with _ease_. It took being higher than a kite to bear that kind of pain, but that meant getting hospitalized.

Still, those long, sinewy, scarred fingers tightened their grip on their prey’s shoulder and froze the man on the spot, then the hand sat there unnaturally still, dark red, leathery and sickening wet, as if the skin had melted and peeled off to show the raw muscles twitching beneath. Those same muscles held the prisoner down like a junkyard’s hydraulic press a click away from resuming its movement and crushing him.

A smooth voice with a rich texture addressed Pierce’s henchman, and it did it with a sophisticated British accent I knew all too well: "You weren’t expecting the owner to come back home anytime soon, were you?" It breezed in from the pearly halo framed by the engraved stone walls, an incongruous, mesmerizing glow that had nothing to do with the natural light filtering from the balcony.

I was struck dumb. I let my gaze float in that faint, ethereal glow for the briefest eternity, then I stared stupidly at the wall, unable to process what it all meant or was supposed to mean. I was forcibly keeping Ella behind me, but my hand felt a word surging in her chest, and it went to cover her mouth in an instant, preventing her from uttering _that_ name: “Lucif...” She was about to breathe out those three oh-so familiar syllables in a sigh of relief, but I didn’t let her.

Something was wrong. Something was _seriously_ wrong, in so many ways my brain couldn’t even process the hows and the whys.

"You hurt the Detective," added the voice, now darker, tinged by an unfathomable mix of sadness and pain that gripped my heart and gave it a painful squeeze in my chest.

Chloe...? Had something happened to Chloe?

But the undertones changed abruptly: "I wouldn’t tolerate _that_ on my best day…" Hearing Mr. Tough Guy squirm on that creaky wooden chair, I couldn’t help leaning slightly forward to peek again. "And you know, these have been the worst 24 hours I went through since I was cast into a literal lake of Hellfire."

The hand sinking its claws into the man’s jacket wore a ring with a black stone on the middle finger. Lucifer’s. _Our_ Lucifer.

The air in the room seemed to have suddenly become hotter, thicker and heavier. I fell back, shivering, but not before catching a glimpse of the _tru_ _ly_ horrific thing still lurking behind the shattered glass: something burnt raw, disfigured, dark red like rusty iron or tarnished copper. At first I thought it was a mask, but in the couple seconds I couldn’t help staring before catching myself, I saw the harsh lines of it tensing.

With a muffled cry and some rustling sounds, Barrow had suddenly gone frantic: with both his wrists still tied to the armrests of the chair, the Sinnerman’s second-in-command was desperately trying to wrestle himself free.

I didn’t dare peeking around the corner anymore, but following Ella’s eyes I caught a faint, scattered reflection on the chunk of stained glass that had survived the creature’s wrath, and I tried to decipher that. "Shush…" A palm had immediately shot to the man’s face, smearing it with blood and covering his mouth to shut him up. The creature bent over, but this time the man didn’t even squirm under the weight of the hand lying still on his shoulder: now that Hell was literally breathing down his neck, he suddenly seemed aware that those scarred, barely human fingers could apply a crushing weight to hold him down, if needed, or delight in doing something much worst. "We don’t wanna wake her, don’t we? She has had enough screams for today," added that voice in an apathetic, hushed tone, letting an even more unnerving hint of tiredness and sadness creep in before adding: "Since you’re already leaking on my favorite rug, I don’t even need to ask what’s your one and only desire..."

I was still holding my gun in a sweaty grip, but the muzzle was pointed downrange. All my instincts screamed “ _Danger! Danger! Danger!”_ , but the mind behind them hadn’t gone blank: it had started a crazy spin cycle, washing and rinsing the recent past and flushing away the remnants of an awful lot of delusions in a desperate, last-minute attempt to keep up with reality.

I wasn’t dying yet, but as I rewatched the last three years of my life projected on fast-forward on the flickering screen of my memory, I discovered that all I had done and said had no more significance, no more depth than my improv sessions.

Now that I had the freaking answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything right in front of my eyes and it was _not "_ 42", I couldn’t playback all the time spent with the eccentric, unpredictable but admittedly trustworthy “civilian consultant” Chloe had chosen as her partner without feeling as a fucking moronic, disposable side character who couldn’t see the truth even when it stared right into his eyes.

Satan in person had just handed me a bankrupting reality check. _Time to wake up and smell the coffee, Dan.._.

I dreaded alerting the creature to our presence more than I trusted a couple 9mm bullets to seriously impair a freaking Archangel, and a very pissed-off one at that.

"I have no idea how you got out of there in one piece, but I’m sure our Boss isn’t finished with you," sputtered the hitman. Quite gutsy of him to say that, considering who he was talking to.

The blackened nails clutching his shoulder let go, but only to grab hold of the back of his collar and lift him together with the armchair he was tied to as if their combined weight amounted to... nothing.

"I’m not the only one the truth was hunting down..." Now the creature was whispering directly in his ear, discharging a fizzling bolt of disdain right down his bones, and that breath must be hot, ‘cause literal _flames_ were now coming to life and licking at its leathery neck and cheekbones. "It caught up with Cain, too." Those same flames ignited in its eyes, too, first a dancing, hypnotic spark that seemed to emerge from dark depths and belong there, then a raging inferno. The core of that ancient being was fueled by a fiery, blazing power that a human-like shell could hardly contain without cracking and being engulfed by it. And like a nuclear plant, it radiated _death._

I was openly watching, now. I wasn’t even stealthy anymore. My eyes were wide open, literally and metaphorically.

If Barrow had seen himself as the boogeyman so far, now he knew how wrong he was. A bigger predator had set its eyes on him. The Predator. Neither him or us could escape anyway. That thing would have noticed the two humans hiding there, their fast, tight, shallow breaths, the smell of the cold sweat running down their backs… It probably already had.

Funny. Terrifying. Pathetic.

"I’ve already broken my Father’s little toy..." Powerful to an oppressive, breathtaking degree, that voice was now reverberating on different octaves at the same time, like an entire choir, or a huge, sinister church organ. “ _That’s Divinity for you, Dan,”_ I thought, evoking long-lost memories of my abuela and her never-ending sermons. "After thousands of years, Cain choose the wrong Adversary. Capital 'A'," said the Devil, breathing down Barrow’s neck and smiling with too many teeth, a far too-wide split in that horrific visage. "I made sure to send him where he belonged." The grin didn’t reach the creature’s eyes, and it sent goosebumps racing down my arms and legs. I felt Ella tugging at my sleeve. There I was, the man, the _police_ man holding a loaded gun… as helpless and scared as she was. All I could do was grab her hand and squeeze it: “ _Come what may, I would never let it go,"_ I silently promised. Despite the shivering, she felt that oath traveling down my arm, reaching her core and settling there. She nodded in return, ready to hold on to that lifeline and use it to keep me afloat too, if I started sinking and drowning in the enormity of it all before she did.

First in line to take the brunt of that Revelation, Barrow had finally cracked. For good. He was whining and whimpering, on the verge of bursting into tears like a child. He begged under his breath.

I expected the King of Hell to end it, to sink his claws into that fragile human frame and give him the gruesome death he deserved before turning his attention to us, but he didn’t. He let go of his prey, putting back down on the floor both the man and the chair he was still tied to.

If Ella and me wanted out, that was the moment. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why, but the biblical monster itself seemed to be giving us the chance: somehow, his stance told me he knew we were there, listening, watching, even without a single side-glance giving away his intentions.

"Give me a reason not to send you down there before your time." He gave that ruthless killer a choice, too.

 _"_ The little girl," Barrow was quick to spit out. He was visibly trembling, but I had to gave it to him that his voice didn’t waver too much. "Beatrice Decker. She was our Boss’s collateral in case something went wrong…"

 _That_ sent my heart rate spiking so high I thought I was having a stroke. A cold shiver crawled up my spine. I tightened my grip on Ella’s hand and I instinctively raised my gun once more, even if I was still partially hiding behind the corner.

Pierce’s henchman found it in himself to smirk: "Nothing more useful than a human shield even _the Devil_ cares about..." he commented. Then he visibly weighted his options, and his expression turned serious again: "They’re holding her hostage at Decker’s place. They don’t know what’s coming for them, or they don’t care," he said. -"Is that enough to earn me a pentecostal coin... Your Majesty?"

I never thought that I might meet the Devil face to face, like I never thought that I might see him _flinch_. He straightened up, an unreadable expression on the grisly traits of his face, and the flames in his eyes flickered for a moment. "Killing humans is not my hobby, and I’m not planning on making a habit of it," he stated. Then that same unnatural stillness charged up from within: "You’ll pay the price for all of this in due time..." His whole body tensed up, as if it could barely contain an Earth-shattering surge of high-voltage _wrath,_ the physical manifestation a primordial, abysmal power that made me recoil and draw further back along the massive stone wall. He had nothing to discharge it on, other then that luxurious penthouse and the three humans trapped in it.

That rumbling voice called me by name: "Daniel." It was a majestic choir, a holy hymn and a battle cry. No mortal being could ignore its incredible pull.

The faint glow that had filled the room since the creature had broken into it was now tinged with a reddish hue.

"You heard him," he said. _And now you heard_ me, it echoed deep in my mind _._

His words demanded immediate obedience: they had the echo of a key turning into a lock. No need to say anything more.

My daughter… my sweet baby was in danger. Trapped. Scared. I had to do something. _We_ had to do something. Now.

With my heart thundering so loudly it seemed about to burst from my chest, I stepped around the corner to face Him.

When I met his gaze, the weight of it fell on me like a grand piano: it was so ancient it made me numb, dizzy… I felt an overwhelming need to cower under it.

 _How did I dare think of this being as_ human _, of all things?_

Like broken gears, my thoughts repeatedly failed to get a grip on each others, until they just stopped. I surrendered to him.

"I’ll get to Chloe’s place as fast as I can, but I could use some help..." My brain didn’t process those words, at first: it wasn’t up to any task at the moment. It had gone completely offline. It took a while for it to register that after meeting mine, the almighty being asking for my help (“ _H_ _elp”..._ _Really_?) had tilted its head curiously, presumably waiting for an answer. Cocking his head to the side like an owl was another strange quirk of his: he did it whenever he couldn’t get the gist of some human behavioral pattern, as if he tried to adjust his visual perspective and get some more insight. _We_ baffled _him_ , an immortal being whose existence dated back to the beginning of time. I would have marveled at the idea, if I weren’t that disconnected.

I’d surrendered my sanity to the dark, unfathomable void I had seen in his eyes, an abyss stretching between ages and stars... I had never felt more mortal before, more insignificant. In front of a creature who must have watched continents collide then drift apart again, my heart beat fast like a hummingbird’s.

"Let Ms Lopez drive," I heard, far in the back of my mind.

My left hand was still holding my colleague’s, and she almost crushed it when she inhaled a deep breath before stepping around the corner and showing herself. Her eyes were wide, her pupils dilated, and she desperately held onto her cross pendant, clutched in both her sweaty palms. Was she still clinging to her faith?

"As soon as those men get the news, the child is dead," Barrow cut in.

He was right: we were taking too long. I needed to get to the damn elevator and the damn car as fast as I could. Calling for reinforcements was out of question: the precinct swarmed with the Sinnerman’s spies, and I had sent the very few people I trusted to the Sinnerman’s lair, hoping to get Chloe out of there alive. Apart from her, the only people I trusted with such a delicate matter were Ella, Charlotte, whom I had lost to a bullet shot by that fucking bastard, and… well, the monster I apparently owed one for killing him.

Thinking of the man who had ended the life of the woman I loved, I felt the gun trembling in my palm, my index finger twitching on the trigger.

"Are you going to shoot me, Dan?" said the being who could incinerate the three of us and the entire building with a snap of his fingers. Dumbfounded, I refocused on it (him?). "I don’t think that I can take any more bullets… Would you mind waiting until I’ve saved your spawn?" he added, feigning indifference.

Without us noticing, the creature had already, oh-so slowly retreated, partially hiding itself behind what remained of the stained glass wall it had shattered before. To our utter astonishment, it stepped further back, raising its hands in a non-threatening posture and bringing that ethereal glow with it… with _him_ , as if not to take the brunt of our reaction.

"You’re… hurt," Ella murmured under her breath, keeping a trembling hand pressed on her mouth.

We both heard her. Barrow heard her too.

Now that I had the chance to take a proper look, the glass shards were not the only thing that didn’t belong, on the floor. There was fresh _blood_ smeared on it. Like.. a lot. It had left a trail on the creamy tiles and the scattered debris, and the prisoner had some smeared on his face, where those horrific hands had touched him.

It couldn’t belong to Pierce’s goons: it was clearly still dripping from some ghastly open wounds I still had to see.

"I am," said the creature with the voice we knew so well . The voice of a teammate, a comrade, someone that… _stranger_ had stolen from us, because there was no way for the dorky, irritatingly playful, unbearably honest  nightclub owner and the freaking Prince of Darkness to be the same person… the same _thing_. Not even remotely. "I am, but I can still fight. And I will."

There were several bullet holes on the front his white button-up shirt, but no blood. Not there, at least.

There went our last chance at defending ourselves. I lowered the Glock and reholstered it. As scary and deadly as a kid’s toy…

The blood was drenching his double cuffs, after trickling down the sleeves, hidden by the black jacket of the once impeccable suit.

Keeping his hands in sight in that seemingly non-threatening gesture, he took one more step back. The fire burning in his eyes had faded, and now that it was gone, I found myself reading the ragged plains of that face and finding something familiar there, hidden in plain sight, lying under the scars and the exposed, sickeningly scathed tissue: the same bone structure, the same dark brown irises. The long, curved lashes fanning the eyes I knew were missing, but there was a softness to his expression I could finally begin to make sense of.

He seemed to be silently pleading with us to let him go. As absurd as it sounded, he didn’t seem too eager to play the bad guy… Not with us, at least.

Ella side-stepped me, and the instant she finally manage to have a proper look, daring to get closer than I had so far, I heard a high-pitched, muffled yelp coming from her. I caught her by the arm to steady her, and that’s how we _both_ got a glimpse of what we probably weren’t supposed to see. What the Lord of Hell was still desperately hiding from us.

The glass shards crackled under the soles of Lucifer’s expensive dress shoes. He lost his footing, and to steady himself, he instinctively flared _them_ on both sides.

Our jaws dropped to the floor.

They were huge, pearly white, emanating an enchanting, mesmerizing glow: looking at them, I felt engulfed in an overwhelming synesthesia of sensations, as if their otherworldly light were singing to my soul (and I knew I had one, now), fondling me, immersing my entire being in the sweet scent of exotic balms and murmuring ancient spells to it. I could feel the immense power behind that spell, but I was gently shielded from it: I floated in a moonlit night that kept the scorching sun hidden under a merciful horizon. For a moment, I experienced the purest bliss; I felt sheltered, cocooned, cared for in a way I had never even imagined, and it left me craving for more, to a frightening degree.

_They brightest of God’s angels. The Lightbringer._

His wings were the most ravishing, pure, magnificent thing I had ever seen, but also the most heinously tainted. I don’t know how long I stared at them: milliseconds, millennia. All I know is that it took me a while to notice how much damage had been inflicted to all that beauty.

There was a faint tremor to them, and the tip of the right one was dragging on the floor, the longest primaries leaving a wake in the debris. Something was painfully wrong in the alignment of the bones close to the tip of what I thought to be the “wrist” (if evolution was still a thing) of that huge additional limb. I caught a glimpse of white that didn’t belong there, and a lot of bright-red blood was trailing down the layered feathers from what seemed to be a horribly exposed fragment of bone.

Their owner seemed far from unfazed by our gaze: he didn’t hold it, as if ashamed, and he kept backing off.

That’s when I saw _her_ , right behind him.

Chloe was laying in a fetal position on the couch, bathing in the unfiltered sunlight coming from the missing glass panels of the balcony and still partially hidden by his tall frame and his even more conspicuous wingspan. I panicked for an instant, until I saw her breastbone raising in shallow but regular breaths.

The fallen angel turned to her, getting close to the light framing her body as if he didn’t belong with her anymore, as if he himself weren’t a source of soothing brightness. The beast looked down at the sleeping beauty, and we saw it changing, turning into something else, something far more familiar and reassuring... The Lucifer we knew began to reemerge: the gruesome mask faded, flickering in the background like a superimposed projection or a ghostly afterimage.

"I think she is in shock," he said, softly, reaching out towards a golden strand of her hair with the elegant, manicured fingers we had seen dancing on the keys of his grand pianos so many times. He pulled them back before touching her, as if he didn’t deem right to indulge in that simple gesture. "Keep her warm and make sure she doesn’t hyperventilate when she wakes up… please."

_Please._

He was looking at her with deep fondness, like a precious, heartbreakingly fragile thing he didn’t dare touch, as if even the lightest, most loving stroke might make her fall apart. He visibly struggled with himself, knowing he had to leave her before she woke up.

When he did turn and step away, I lost some more precious instants before I found it in myself to rush to her side in his stead. I was still waiting to wake up from that vivid, feverish dream and find my way back to reality.

 

 

 

………

 

 

 

"I’ll save your spawn… I promise."

I knew that voice, that smooth, husky timbre, and I knew only one person whose word was an unyielding, unbreakable bond. Floating among distant, muffled sounds and a warm light filtering from afar, I clung to them for dear life, wanting, _needing_ to resurface.

My mind had taken refuge in a long-lost memory, and it was a memory I actually didn’t wish to relive.

That tiny little thing twitching on the floor, those bleary eyes, the rustle of the broken limb smearing its blood on the cold tiles of my mother’s backyard. I didn’t know why, but my brain wouldn’t let go of that image.

I willed that miniature version of myself to move, to do something, but she just kept staring, crouching on the floor and hovering over the little bird with her small hands stuffed in the folds of her skirt, morbidly fascinated. She stayed there until it stopped quivering altogether. She didn’t even know what that meant.

I had been held in an incredibly soft, snow-white cocoon of pure bliss, but that warmth was gone now, and I knew that nothing would cushion my fall, when I plunged back into the far less reassuring reality waiting for me. I would take the full brunt of it like the little bird I had found agonizing on the doorstep that day.

For an instant, I thought I was feeling the same warmth again, close, but that sensation crystallized and shattered too soon. There it was... There it went.

I struggled to open my eyes, to let the light in: I felt the shadow crack and scrabbled at it to find a crevice, a handhold to climb a steep slope I couldn’t even see. I wanted out, and I wanted it now, whatever was waiting on the other side.

I felt my hands again, and my hands felt something under their fingertips: a smooth, leathery surface. I blinked my eyes, trying to focus them on the creamy, vitelline color spreading under them. My head was spinning and the world was still a blur, but I heard another familiar voice, and this time it was very close: "Chloe… Can you hear me?" it called me, frantic and high-pitched. "Are you all right?" Two palms held my temples, brushing the strands of hair away, then slid to my shoulders, and I was suddenly engulfed in the most welcome bear hug of my life.

"E... Ella..."

I felt sore but more or less whole, apart for the sharp pain coming from the bruise the bullet had left under the vest I was luckily wearing.

"Yes… I… I think I am," I manage to stammer out, wiping my eyes with the back of both hands while my colleague and friend steadied me.

Dan was there, too: he put a hand on my shoulder, and that was the reason why I didn’t start sobbing.  
My cheeks were wet; I felt cold, a cold spreading from the marrow of my bones to my whole body. I was a shivering mess, feeling goosebumps all over my body… Even the hair on the nape of my neck were standing at attention.

That same moment, a rustling sound and a bright white stain at the edge of my vision suddenly reminded me _why._

_Fuck… Fuck… Fuck!_

I wriggled free from Ella’s embrace and glanced over her shoulder. Her heart was beating rabbit-fast: she seemed to know what I was trying to look at, and dread it.

“ _Don’t, Chloe. Please, don’t..._ ”, I felt her silent warning when she hugged me even tighter.

Because there _he_ was.

A vision.

A nightmare.

"I need to go." he said under his breath, facing the balcony. He didn’t turn to me, he didn’t meet my stare. If he did, I would have crumbled. I would have fallen to pieces, and he probably knew it.

I held my breath, blinded by the Truth he was forcing me to stare at, crushed under the capital “T” at the beginning of the word.

"Have you ever needed to prove what you are… Chloe?" he said without looking.

He wasn’t ashamed of what he was, and what that meant.

 _Chloe_ …  
He never used my first name, nor my “impossibly boring middle name, Jane”. _Detective_ was a term of endearment, on his lips. I was _his_ Detective… and I felt it. He had made me feel the real weight of that title so many times, the respect it commanded, but also the softness behind it when he was the one purring it softly. So many times, it had sounded like a pledge of devotion that I desperately wanted to cling to.

“Is this… _us_ … real?” he had asked me once, with such fondness I too wondered if I was dreaming.

Hearing him call me “Chloe” was unfamiliar yet intimate... unbearably so, now that he had turned into such an alien being, billions years and _light_ years away from my tiny little existence and my tiny little planet.

 _Sorry.._ That word was bound to echo in my mind and haunt me for a long time: I could read it in his posture, in the drooping line of his shoulders and the bent angle of his long, elegant neck, but he would probably never say it out loud.

I had rushed down those stairs with a deafening roar in my ears, stuck on the gut-wrenching thought of finding his corpse at the foot of the last flight… The relief I had felt spotting him _alive_ at the epicenter of the disaster had been so overwhelming I had failed to see the gaping ravine waiting to swallow me whole. He was the one hovering over a lifeless body, not the other way around, but the world was meant to come crashing down anyway as soon as he turned to me.

“You are safe… That’s all that matters” he had said on the rooftop, holding me in a sheltering embrace. He had touched the bullet stuck in my vest, close to the heart, and I’d covered his hand with mine to reassure him, to keep both of us grounded. He was safe too, still alive after facing alone a platoon of armed thugs, but that _wasn’t_ the only thing that mattered, not by a long shot.

A terrifying monster there and then, a mind-boggling chimera here and now.

Dragging the tip of a pair of long feathered limbs amid the glass shards scattered on the floor, fragments of the imploded windows he must have smashed into while carrying my limp body, he turned to me and finally looked me in the eyes. _This is it,_  he silently acknowledged me, skipping the unsaid before I looked too deep into them. _Farewell..._

He was back to his human masquerade, 5 o’clock stubble, long lashes, dark curls, luscious lips and all, but the flames I had seen in his eyes before fainting were escaping the cracks, filtering through his skin, as if that shell couldn’t contain him anymore. Somehow, he had shielded me from the crash-landing and from everything else: I was alive and almost unscathed, and I knew I had to thank him and him only for it.

I had never needed to prove that I was a woman, a mother, a homicide detective of the LAPD, or a human. I had never needed to prove that I was mortal, cause I simply _was._

Lucifer had proved to me who he was many times… He just hadn’t felt the need to prove _what_ he was. To be fair, he had made both things clear since I’d met him for the first time, sitting on the bench of his grand piano and voicing his righteous indignation over the murder of an innocent woman while sipping top-shelf whiskey from a tumbler.

“Lucifer Morningstar… Is that a stage name or something?”

“God-given, I’m afraid.”

He stepped out on the balcony, hitting a potted plant with one of his huge divine appendices and grunting an indignant “Bloody Hell...” under his breath when it crashed on the floor.

Before shutting down in the middle of those gangsters’ lair and letting me free-fall on the mosaic floor and the debris, my brain had barely registered the sight of all the bloodied, mangled feathers scattered everywhere: they were so out of place it had filtered them out of the overall picture, centered on the alien-looking creature talking with Lucifer’s voice and inflection. However, the whitest and fluffiest of them all had floated and settled right in front of my eyes, dripping red blood from its broken quill and leaving an afterimage under my lids when I had closed them.  
Now, many more were silently, softly landing on his balcony’s deck.

With a sigh, he decided to overlook the mess he was making and gaze instead at the horizon, grabbing the glass balustrade, cracking it under his fingers _._

I made a step forward, holding my breath and lifting a hand as if I wanted to hold him back.

For a split second he seemed to hesitate, staring into the abyss and tentatively flapping his huge, feathered libs, maybe not so sure they could keep his weight in the air anymore, but then he took a deep breath and plunged into the void with my strangled scream following right after.

Ella bolted toward the railing to lean over it: my heart stopped when I saw her putting a hand to her mouth in horror as if watching a suicide fall to his death, but then her shoulders relaxed a little and her eyes widened in _awe_.

When I had the courage to join her at the edge of the balcony, something mind-numbingly _impossible_ was gliding over the roofs of our city, the “city of angels”, with utter disregard of the laws of physics.

"I see the pun, Lucifer," I murmured between my trembling fingers, choking the unhinged laugh (painfully akin to a sob) that was about to escape my lips. "I see it quite clearly, now..."

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's celebrate the new season's Eve (pun intended...) together, dear Lucifans! ;-)


	2. Under the Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fasten your seat belts for one hell of a ride: it's Ella's turn at the wheel!
> 
> "Under the Water" by AURORA (live): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVGQWw4Ap6o

 

 

“Mommy...”

I was alive, Trixie was alive, but the coil tightly wound in my guts didn’t loosen up when I heard her quivering voice. I cleared mine, struggling not to put all my worst fears in the question I desperately needed my baby to answer: “Are you OK, monkey? Are you hurt?”

She mumbled something along the lines of “I’m fine”.

“Daddy is here with me… We are coming,” I tried to reassure her.

I heard a rustling noise as she probably adjusted her hold on the cordless. Her voice then became so tiny I could barely hear her: “Do angels… die, mom?”

My grip on the already battered cellphone tightened so much I thought I could crush it in my palm.

“The can’t… Can they?” My baby gave a little whimper, sniffling close to the receiver.

Dan was itching to listen too: he grabbed my knee, and my gaze dropped to his white knuckles. I had to put the call on speaker and let him listen to it too, or he would have swerved the car and cut one or two lanes in his attempt to lean toward the faint, trembling voice of his daughter.

“I… I think he’s not breathing,” we heard her sob. “What should I do?”

I was the one who stopped breathing: had all the oxygen been sucked out of that damn car?

Dan ignored a stop sign and cut across an intersection without even slowing down, while I held on for dear life to the door’s handle. He grabbed my wrist to get the phone closer to his mouth before hissing: -Where is i… he, baby?-

Our daughter didn’t answer at first, but we heard some more rustling noises as she put her ear to the phone again. “I can feel his heart beating,” she inhaled, forcibly stopping her sniveling, “but he won’t open his eyes...” I could picture her wiping the tears with the back of her hands, and I prayed that there wasn’t any blood on them.

“Trixie, baby,” her father cut her short. “I need you to get away from i… from him. Are you alone? Is there anybody else there?”

She spurned his demand as if the mere thought of leaving offended her: “The three bad men are..." She stopped, probably checking her surroundings, "up there, still out cold." _Up there?_  "What do I do if they wake up? He’s hurt, and I can’t protect him...” Her pained, scared voice twisted the knife already sunk deep in my gut. “He told me to run away as soon I could, but...”

“Damn, Trix,- Dan cut in again. “You need to stay away from that _thing_!”

I didn’t get what he meant at first, neither did she. A little mutter reached my ears from the other side, almost washed away by the traffic noise: “‘Thing’?” she echoed, taken aback by her father’s words.

Uttered by her small voice, that word didn’t just _sting_ : it carved a piece of my soul out. A surge of nausea and dizziness almost knocked me off my axis again.

I grabbed the phone from Dan’s grasp and mentally thanked my brave, righteous child for reminding me of what I really felt, what I really _was_. “Hang in there, _both_ of you. We’re close,” I said to her, making her father freeze at the wheel and run another red light as if he hadn’t even seen it. That was _me_ , Chloe Jane Decker, foolishly trusting her instincts once more, and it was a line I wasn’t going to back down from, whatever epiphanies were bound to break at my shore. I was shoulder-deep in the water when I didn’t even know an ocean was there: if it was going to sweep me away, I could only swim and try to stay afloat.

Everything narrowed down to a single purpose: _Get there fast. Save them both_. The mere idea of losing one of them was enough to set me ablaze like a sea of gasoline.

I didn’t know what to answer to Trixie’s question: I had no idea if an archangel could die, if the concept even _applied_ to a few thousand, million, possibly _billion-_ year-old being... What I knew for certain is that after all Hell had broken lose (pun intended, thank you so much) in those mobster’s hideout, he had shielded my mortal self from a literal storm of bullets: after taking the first one, I had heard panicked screams erupting from the chest I was being held against, then Marcus had shouted the order, “Finish it,” and those screams had become _pained_ , dreadfully so.

Thinking again, maybe I _did_ know the answer. He had given it to me himself.

Malcolm. All the blood spreading on that warehouse’s floor after Lucifer had turned the attention of the armed man on himself… “I thought he killed you,” I had whispered after he had _somehow_ saved Trixie and me anyway. His shirt was still drenched with blood, the perfect excuse for not joining the group hug. “Oh, he _did_. Yes,” he had said with a troubled smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I got better...”

It might have even happened _twice_. “Well, look who’s back...” he had smiled at me again in a hospital room, several months later. “You didn’t die after all… That makes one of us.” Another soft, tired smile. Again, he had _somehow_ managed to get the antidote to the poison that had nearly killed me, retrieving the formula after the only man who knew it had slid his throat right in front of my eyes. He hadn’t even taken all the credit for that one: “a joined effort”, he had called it. As exhausted as I was then, I hadn’t forgotten a single line of that conversation. What had he done? How had he made that trip _downstairs_? How many times had he saved my life no matter the cost, without me knowing?

 _There must be a limit to how dense a so-called LAPD “detective” can turn out to be_ , I scoffed at myself.

I hadn’t let Dan get his hands on the phone again, and while I was sinking into my own thoughts, he had kept himself busy getting in touch with the precinct to test the water on that side. “No backup team is coming,” he said, cursing in Spanish right after ending the call. “Pierce made sure of it”.

“I really hope that _hijo de puta_ is rotting in Hell,” I heard Ella grumbling from the back seat.

“He is,” I reassured her, fairly certain of that now.

“Perks of having the Devil on our team...” Ella choked on her own shrill laugh, as inappropriate as the circumstances demanded, raising a hand to clutch at her cross pendant before adding: “He’s still... I mean… “team Deckerstar” and _stuff_ , right?”

Dan literally growled. He cursed again in his mother tongue, bumping a fist on the wheel and hitting the horn. The car swerved and a truck behind us honked back at the reckless maneuver.

That was it. I had enough of Dan’s stubbornness: Lucifer was right about having Ella at the wheel. At the next red traffic light I swiftly turned the key and killed the engine, then turned to face the forensic scientist, a fellow member of the Tribe: “You used to steal cars when you were in Detroit, didn’t you, Ella?”

She nodded, unashamed.

“Then you drive,” I unfastened Dan’s belt next to me. “So we have some chance of getting there alive”. Turning back, I frowned at the still cursing and still fidgeting ex-husband I couldn’t trust with the task.

She nodded again and jumped out of the car to switch seats. Before I even heard the click of the rear door closing again, the tires screeched on the asphalt and I immediately knew that we were out for one hell of a ride ( _Couldn’t help it, thank you again_ ). Propelled like a cannonball straight into LA’s hectic traffic, Dan’s old sedan fired on all cylinders: Ella zigzagged and cut corners at high speed like a pro racer hell-bent ( _What a cosmic inside joke we were in on now… Was I supposed to use the capital “H”?_ ) on winning the World Rally Championship.

“The Devil made me do it,” our nerdy forensic scientist sheepishly justified herself, after pulling off a handbrake turn that sent the vehicle into a spin with the rear wheels locked up, leaving a trail of smoke and skidmarks on the road. Squeezed breathless against the side windows by the centrifugal force, neither me nor Dan objected to that. At least the siren I had turned on screamed louder than the soon-to-be-spent tires of the unmarked car breaking an awful lot of traffic laws and leaving a mess in its wake.


	3. So Take This Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "This Night" by Black Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HVpBG0fnqw

 

Dan and me positioned on both sides of the front door, guns drawn and loaded. Swallowing hard and taking a deep breath, I pushed it inwards without making any noise, and it gave in. It wasn’t locked. How come I wasn’t surprised? Lucifer had always seemed to easily have his way with locks and bolts, including mine. _Especially_ mine. Although in this case, maybe it was the mobsters’ doing.

We leveled our guns on both sides, a silent understanding synchronizing our movements in a dance we had perfected over the years, a dance our lives had depended on in many occasions.

After clearing the entrance, I gestured for him to cover me while I moved forwards and scanned the unnervingly-quiet living area.

That’s when I saw him: “up there”... quite literally.

There was a human projectile stuck in the wooden shelves suspended over my kitchen’s countertop. Two hundred and something pounds, give or take: kudos to the carpenter, ‘cause I doubt the fancy piece of furniture hanging from the roof had been tested for that specific purpose. From the same spot, I could easily guess the fate of a second thug: his legs dangled limply from the skylight he had crashed through headfirst.

“Whoa,” was Dan’s concise, helpful comment. I followed his gaze when he looked down at one of the men’s submachine guns, abandoned on the floor: the barrel was bent at a 90 degree angle and the steel seemed to be partly _melted_.

The third man hadn’t been luckier than the others: he had gone right through the railing of the stairs, on the opposite side of the living room, and his body was still wedged in between the metal rods in a very unflattering position. Unconscious? Dead? Who knew. Who cared.

Where was my bab…?

“Mommy! Dad!”

We heard her voice coming from behind our backs and the couch, where the door to the backyard seemed to be ajar and the long curtains of the adjacent windows were slightly fluttering, pushed aside by the air coming through.

Dan lowered his gun and rushed towards Trixie’s voice, strangely muffled… then stopped dead in his tracks.

I saw the same scene, and it clicked.

My mouth agape and my breath quickly picking up, I got a fairly clear picture of how he had protected me by the fire of multiple SMGs and pistols, when Marcus had ordered his goons to finish us. My daughter’s voice was muffled because she was engulfed in a gorgeous, faintly glowing cloud of fluff: a pair of gruesomely battered and shattered _angel wings_ keeping the world at bay, her shell-shocked parents included.

I wasn’t wearing Lucifer’s pendant, but I could easily picture him commenting: “What about a parure, Detective?”

I swallowed, seeing up close how much saving me and my daughter had cost him. Again.

With nothing but a conflicting mix of worry and awe on her face, Trixie twisted and squirmed a little bit to squeeze out of that tight embrace and pop her head out of all the fluff; when the barbs of a ruffled down feather made her sneeze, the whole, huge limb embracing her twitched.

Her guardian Devil was apparently unconscious: he lay slumped on the floor with his back resting against the wall and his legs bent to the side in an uncomfortable, almost kneeling position. We made no attempt to approach him, in that condition: it seemed wiser to let the sleeping monster lie.

When Trix freed her right arm, careful not to touch any of his open wounds, I watched in horror as a little flame crept along her wrist, then settled on her open palm, but to my utter disbelief, she didn’t even flinch: fascinated, she looked at it as it danced and flickered on her bare skin. “It’s warm, but it’s not hurting me,” she felt the urge to reassure us, after meeting our astonished stares, as if she considered the idea of Lucifer hurting her, willingly or not, to be somewhere between blatantly absurd and mildly offensive. “It tickles,” she giggled.

One wing was spread on the floor and bent at an awkward angle, with both of them sitting over it. When Trixie moved, it shivered: it wasn’t just a huge, incongruous appendix attached to a human figure it didn’t belong to, but a fully functioning part of a more complex organism, connected to it by sinews and a full set of powerful muscles, properly wired to the central nervous system. Had its owner been awake, the excruciating pain would have driven him crazy… That’s why my child needed to get away from him no matter what.  
Dan must have thought the same thing, ‘cause he leveled his handgun again and took the safety off. He had taken his personal P226, leaving to me the police-issued Glock 22.

Nobody thought that a barely audible “click” might be enough, but it was. And triggering the injured, traumatized being already struggling to shield us from the nuclear meltdown about to go down in its core proved to be an awful idea.

Lucifer’s entire body tensed up. The wing that was lying limp suddenly flared, the primaries aligning: impossibly sharp, the hardened barbs hit the armchair a few feet away from him and cut right through its metal frame.

Both me and Dan yelped, recoiling. My arms went up reflexively.

There was the furnace of a star confined within that fragile shell, and it was about to go supernova on us: a conscience, a will was needed to keep it under control, and that conscience was spent, overwhelmed.

Or so it seemed.

The other wing stayed where it was, bent around Beatrice to protect her: turned into a deadly weapon, but not leaving her exposed, whatever the threat was. Lucifer’s eyes were open, now, ablaze with fire but seemingly unfocused: there wasn’t a sentient mind behind that reaction, only his instincts. Bad news. _Really_ bad news for us. The flames spread all over him and started licking at his face and his hair, breaking through his skin without burning it, as if his body were just a thin coating layer, an outworn vessel about to crack: the raging inferno inside was tearing him at the seams, barely contained.

The only thing that prevented me from finding myself in the throes of a full-blown panic attack was the fact that my daughter seemed calm, almost unfazed. Maybe… worried, but not for herself. She wasn’t afraid, nor in pain: that much was obvious.

Feeling Lucifer’s labored breath with her hands on his chest, she frowned at _us_ , not him _. “_ Stop it, dad! Put that gun down! _”_ she admonished her father. “Don’t you see that you are _scaring_ him?”

Dumbstruck, Dan slowly lowered the muzzle, holding the handle with both his trembling, white-knuckled hands. “I am scaring… _him_?”, he stammered, his eyes transfixed on the weaponized feathers at the wingtips. “ _I_ am the one who’s scared shitless, here!”

He stopped whining right away when he heard a low-pitched, cavernous grumble coming from the creature still laying in a crumpled heap on the floor, as if boosted by the subwoofers of a concert hall. It took a tremendous effort for Lucifer’s human-like side to come back online and override the feral, primordial urge to unleash his wrath and be done with it. That far more familiar and reassuring side of his spoke with human words in a croaky human voice: “...And I’m the one who’s hurting,” he slurred, winning an internal battle he might haven't even bothered fighting.

Lifting a hand to massage his temples, the disconcerting chimera used the second of his six limbs (insects were the only flying hexapods I could think of) to support himself, since the wall he was propped against supported his back, but didn’t prevent him from slumping to the side.

His eyes blinked in an attempt to clear the fog blurring his vision, and to Dan’s utter dismay, he was the person those eyes chose to focus on, as soon as the blur was gone.

“Would you mind putting that gun away, Detective Douche? It’s unnerving,” he said in a hoarse, gravelly voice. “I doubt I could get away from here on my own limbs, if you put another hole in me.”

“Get”, not “walk“. “Limbs”, not “legs”.

Dan did lower the muzzle a little bit, but not before meeting the Devil’s earnest request with a mocking rebuff: “ _Indulge_ me, please”, he shrugged. “Consider it to be my coping strategy”.

Lucifer frowned, and even if his eyes were back to the dark brown we were used to, I felt a sudden pang of fear and a cold shiver crawling up my spine.

“And it’s not like it can actually hurt you… you freak” charged head-on my incredibly reckless ex-husband.

When the creature who had dared challenging _God Himself_ shut his eyes and covered them with a hand pinching both his temples, I thought it was another praiseworthy attempt at keeping the world at bay and his anger in check. Instead, it turned out he was fighting a losing battle against the pain, now that he was back to his senses.

He collected himself.“My current mood swing has _not_ reached the self-destructive bottom, yet,” he said, holding Dan’s gaze with a resigned, dejected expression. After weighting the possible outcomes, he made up his mind: “Now that I’m not needed anymore, I’ll relieve you of my unwelcome presence.” With a sigh, he loosened the tight knot still keeping the muscles of his right wing from letting go of its weight, like cutting the slings of a protective swathe, and gave Trixie the chance to escape his embrace. Apparently, all he wanted was to keep her away from the line of fire… Daniel noticed that, too.

-Now, little human...”- His breathing was growing labored, and he was paler than I had ever seem him. -Go to your mother.- He gently, oh-so gently nudged her with his wingtip towards me. When she turned her widened, confused eyes in my direction, his irises lit again: he glared back at Dan without her noticing, daring him to put that damn itchy finger on the trigger before the child was at a safe distance from both of them.

“ _This is him_ ”, I thought, struck dumb by a high-voltage bolt coming from nowhere like a random discharge. That was what Lucifer was, who he was, underneath it all, and I felt such a surge of fondness in my chest my breath stilled until the brain actually started to short-circuit. We had hurt him, in so many different ways, and a creature pained by rejection couldn’t be the embodiment of evil.

Finally, _finally_ the whirling maelstrom of my thoughts flushed me down and expelled me from the world’s drain pipe: it really felt like drowning, when it sucked me down, but I knew I could gulp as much air as I needed as soon as I resurfaced.

At a loss as he always was when it came to complex human feelings, the clueless dork looked at my puzzled expression, unable to read it, and when he did, he read it all wrong. He had been my partner for years, the roots of “our thing” (as I used to call it, whatever it was) reached deep, but his grasp on human emotions wasn’t firm at all, yet. Even less so, my understanding of a Celestial being’s reactions and how to handle them, now that I knew he had always been telling the truth about himself.

A being as ancient as the stars and the void stretching between them wasn’t supposed to seek leniency from a bunch of mere mortals, to strip bare in front of them: the fact that he looked so broken, so utterly defeated was as wrong as a tear in the Universe’s fabric.

He reached his own conclusions and he exhaled the remaining breath with the bleak finality of a last goodbye. That was it, for him. He’d had enough.

He glanced at the backdoor, but no: apparently, taking flight and leaving unnoticed wasn’t an option anymore. That left him only with the front entrance.

He clenched his teeth, taking a deep breath and preparing for what was coming. With a muffled, strangled groan of pain he forced himself to get on one knee, first, then stand precariously. He couldn’t lean against the wall and trap his injured wings in between: that seemed too painful to even contemplate.

Maintaining some semblance of dignity was probably the only reason why he hadn’t let his wings droop: he kept them partly folded, half their span occupying most of my living room but leaving him some spare space to maneuver around the furniture.

Oozing from a deep gash on his forearm, a rivulet of fresh blood had drenched a sleeve, dripping on the floor: darker than the black fabric, the stain was quite conspicuous. He had buttoned up the jacket not to show the bullet holes in his once-pristine shirt: no wounds could be spotted underneath, and his intermittent invulnerability baffled me.

I instinctively reached out when I saw him lose his balance, but I couldn't bring myself to rush to his side, and I didn't let go of the hand of my daughter, who was about to do just that. Unfortunately, he noticed, and he didn't let me get away with it: “You had such a horrified expression, when you saw my _other_ face…”, he looked me in the eyes. He took a deep breath, then straightened his back, taking a few steps toward the entrance of the apartment, giving us a wide berth. He met my daughter's moistened eyes, and I felt her small hand squeezing mine in a silent protest.

Stopping midway, he steadied himself against the wall, spreading his bloodied fingers and leaving dark-red stains on the pastel surface. Aware of the impending necessity to make his huge wings disappear before stepping out into the world, he tried folding them against his back, rolling his shoulders, but the splintered, partly exposed joint of the one that had suffered the worst damage didn't let him: it was obvious that the movement struck him with a bolt of blinding, unbearable pain. Letting out a strangled sound, he stumbled, blinking his eyes twice as if his vision had gone black for a moment and the room had started spinning around him. “If you want me to go back to Hell, all you need to do is  _ask_ …” he panted, meeting my eyes for the last time. “I'll oblige.”

With that, the fearsome adversary of God collapsed to the floor in a heap of ruffled, bloody feathers. Some more came loose, floating in the air.

 


	4. Confide in Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I can see the gears of your brain spinning… Admit it: you’re already sciencing the heck out of this, Ella."  
> No, I was not.  
> My voice dropped an octave: “I'm just trying to keep up with all these epiphanies,” I murmured. For an instant, I felt that deep, dark water rise up to engulf me and soak into my skin, my bones, my cells: I was tempted to ease myself into the unknown and let it dissolve me. Then I cleared my throat and looked back at Daniel: “If reality doesn't fit my beliefs, reality wins.”
> 
> "Confide in Me" by Kylie Minogue (The Abbey Road Sessions, 2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7gGPSOCGYE

 

 

  
I saw Chloe's eyes widening and her lips opening in a mute exclamation, mouthing the name of her partner, but I had already bolted forward when I realized she was impeded by the couch getting in the way and I was not.

I caught Lucifer’s head in both my open palms right before it hit the floor. _N_ _ice catch, Ella._ I didn’t want that pretty skull of his to crack open before he had given me the answer to a gazillion questions.

Panting for the adrenaline rush, I found myself down on my knees, nesting a Celestial being and wondering how in the world my life had become like this. I’d dived without giving it a second thought... As simple as that. My bruised elbow could testify to that. Had “free will” something to do with it?

I mentally pleaded ‘not guilty’: _“You see_ a friend _crumpling in a dead faint and you don’t jump in to help him, Big Guy? Not cool…_

Accountable or not for being the cool one once more, now I had the Devil in my lap, and he was trembling, curled in a ball, eyes tightly shut to keep the pain at bay. An injured wing was trapped under him, crushed by his weight, and a low, desperate moan slipped through his lips and clenched teeth: more than hearing it, I felt it in my bowels, resonating through our joined bodies and crawling up my spine.

From having a little crisis of faith and a few issues with the Almighty to babysitting a surprisingly nonthreatening incarnation of _Satan…_ What a leap. What had I done to find myself at the epicenter of a seism of cosmic proportions?

“As the only believer in this room, I think that pointing a gun at an Archangel who also happens to rule Hell is unlikely to buy you a fast-lane ticket to a cozy afterlife, dude,” I informed Dan without even taking a breath. Better to stomp on his lit fuse and put it out right away, before he made an even bigger mess of that already massive screw-up.

“I told you to stay outside,” he snarked. “You're not even armed!”

Ignoring his retort and switching to a different strategy to distract him, I made a great show of looking at the ceiling in wonder: “What is this guy doing up there, anyway?” I feigned surprise, even if I had already peeked inside and scanned the Devil’s playground before venturing past the entrance. One of Pierce’s goons was literally hanging from the roof. Talk about a plan (quite literally) flown out of the window... “Did he throw him across the room or something?” Not to mention the other guy stuck in the kitchen’s shelves. I lowered my eyes on the sleeping beauty laying in my lap: he was quite adorably ruffled, now that his slick hairstyle had come undone and the unruly curls had sprung free from the slightly perfumed product he used to keep them in place. “Here’s the Big Bad Devil for you,” I almost smirked.

His additional limbs were hitching in pain all across their entire, considerable span. The bogeyman putting all boogeymen to shame since the beginning of time had given his all to protect a human and her daughter from harm, and he was paying the price for it: I had never seen anyone or anything so utterly _spent._

“ _Someone tell me how to make sense of_ that, _pretty please,”_ I silently begged the Heavens.

I frowned at the aforementioned human, still holding Beatrice’s hand, and at the other (completely useless) individual she had mated and conceived her brave, lovely child with: “Are you going to help, or just stay there and stare?” I urged them both after meeting Trixie’s worried, almost panicked gaze.

I didn’t even realize I was stroking the Devil’s hair until he started _purring_ in my lap like a big cat: the biggest WTF moment in my entire existence, even bigger than discovering that I had a ghost following me around, that my boss was a criminal mastermind or that my favorite civilian consultant was _not_ a peculiarly dedicated method actor.

Chloe’s eyes went even wider: “What the he…” she cleared her throat, “...ck?” With her jaw dropped to the floor, she pointed a finger at the sound: “Is that…?”

“Felines do it when they are hurt or sick, seeking comfort…” I dropped the adventurous comparison like a hot potato: the implications opened their own can of worms.

Apparently, our friend was a mind-boggling chimera of different animal parts stitched together in a strangely coherent entity: he had probably inherited the quirks and behavioral traits of each one, and truth be told, that explained _a lot_ of things. I couldn’t even rule out the possibility of him sprouting horns or a tail, if he wanted to: God probably didn’t subject his most complex creations to the constraints and limitations of a single natural species... provided that Nature itself was still a thing.

“I skipped the exam on angels’ anatomy at the University, but if a human bleeds so much, he is as good as dead,” I told the Detectives, just to keep them in the loop of my professional, absolutely reliable assessment of the perfect storm raging over our heads. “He has a heart, yes, and it's beating way too fast: I think he's going into a hypovolemic shock… If we don't help him, we won't have a dazzling fallen angel hanging out at the precinct anymore.”

The King of Hell growing attached to some random humans and sacrificing his eternal life to save them? That might tip the cosmic balance a little bit. Talk about the sky falling down...

Chloe flinched. God, angels, Heaven, Hell… Not only she had never believed in their existence, but she probably didn't _want_ them to be real.

“Can you hear me, Luce…?” I tried testing the waters, not knowing what to expect from the injured creature exhaling its last breaths on my thigh, a creature supposed to pour its wrath on human souls like molten ore for all Eternity.

“Be careful of the longest feathers,” hissed Dan. “They get crazy sharp if you startle him… They're fucking _weapons_!”

When a low, even more animalistic growl instantly wiped away the soft purring sound, I glared back at my colleague with an urgent message: _Shut the f*ck up or the wounded beast will gut me, thank you very much..._

Luckily, the winged human feline calmed down as soon as I resumed petting it. “If he trashes, we won't be able to hold him down… That’s for sure.” While I kept stroking him with my right hand, I checked his vitals with my left one, counting the heartbeats while checking my wristwatch.

“The asshole has always been too sculpted and well-built for being a lazy, sleep-deprived alcoholic who constantly indulges in junk food and stolen pudding... Not to mention the fact that he’s _fa_ _r_ too strong for his size.”  
“Is that a pang of envy, Dan?” was my quick comeback. “Comparing body parts is never a good idea… especially with an Archangel.” An Archangel whose bodily functions I probably shouldn't benchmark against the vital signs of a male human in his late-thirties or early-forties. “If what he told me holds truth, he might have needed a very fast metabolism to _lit the stars_ …”

With that, a silence as heavy and thick as my abuelita’s heavy-duty woolen blanket fell on the three of us (four, actually, considering that Beatrice had been far too quiet all along).

“Wait… _What?_ ” murmured Dan. “Has he ever said something… along those lines?”

“Yes, he definitely did. ‘The ungrateful prick loves giving orders, then taking all the credit when he deems the result worthy of Him’,” I managed a decent imitation of a posh British accent. “‘Let there be light, said the Almighty… But I was the one who had to figure out _how’._ ” Quoting the Devil word by word? Perks of having a very good memory.

That really sent our heads spinning.

Strangely, stroking Lucifer's soft, curly hair made me feel more grounded, even in front of that revelation.

“Holy… cow...”

“I had been singing Space Oddity and dancing around all day, when he said something about taking a selfie on the passenger seat of Musk’s Roadster… You know, the car that’s floating in space”. Such an awesome prank to make and a cool pic to post on his Instagram. “I laughed so much, pointing out that he needed to figure out how to make his cellphone work in space, after flying up there and finding the needle in the proverbial haystack, but he gave up only because he didn’t want to use,” air quotes, “’the bloody wings Dad had forced back on him’.” The same wings he had used to shield his favorite humans from harm. “Than we ended up discussing interplanetary travel, and he had his own theories on that too... As I mentioned before, you might wanna reconsider pointing a gun at him before you trigger a nuclear meltdown in the middle of Chloe’s living room,” I took the chance to warn Dan again.

“Luci-fer,”murmured Chloe under her breath. “The ‘light-bringer’...”

His wing was straining under his weight, shaky and in pain, unable to free itself. “He has literally _enlightened_ us, eons ago...” I didn’t dare touching it, even if I felt its long bones and its muscles brushing against my hip in that weak attempt to find relief. “But he has ended up being punished as a traitor. Like Prometheus...”

I listened to my own voice, and it sounded haunted. My thoughts were muffled, too, like shooting stars in a distant blur. I probably gave off different vibes, though, ‘cause Dan’s gaze locked on my apparently steady hands, one straightening the Devil’s curls and the other running again to feel his pulse, and he reached his own conclusion: “I can see the gears of your brain spinning… Admit it: you’re already sciencing the heck out of this, Ella.”

No, I was not.

My voice dropped an octave: “I'm just trying to keep up with all these epiphanies,” I murmured. For an instant, I felt that deep, dark water rise up to engulf me and soak into my skin, my bones, my cells: I was tempted to ease myself into the unknown and let it dissolve me. Then I cleared my throat and looked back at Daniel: “If reality doesn't fit my beliefs, reality wins.”

That stare had to be the closest thing to a defiant scowl he had ever seen on my face: enough to make him realize something and finally put his weapon away. “Fine,” he sighed.

That’s when Chloe decided to step in. She had stayed away until now, closed off, literally unsteady on her feet, but after meeting her daughter’s gaze with a slow, meaningful nod, she came back to life and got closer. Her expression when she crouched down beside Lucifer's limp body was so full of love and anguish I forgot to breath until I felt the first tear trailing down my cheek.

“Tell me what I can do to save him, Ella...” She wiped away that tear with the back of her hand and pierced me with watery but resolute eyes: “Please.”

 


	5. The Broken Things Inside

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's a longer chapter to repay your patience... Real life took over for a while, but I'm back on track!
> 
> "Innocence" by Nathan Wagner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBsqrLySseU

 

 

I was still holding on my daughter’s hand like a lifeline, taking fast and shallow breaths, when I felt it squeeze mine: “He needs you, mom,” she whispered, without letting the others hear it.

My worst fears and my pent-up feelings had gotten the better of me. They were about to burst like shaken champagne, but those words gave me the push I needed to grab the damn bottle, cork it and kick it to the curb.

Yes, he needed all the help he could get. He _deserved_ it.

I knelt beside him, cutting the tail of my own thoughts before I started wondering if fixing that whole mess was even _possible._ “Tell me what I can do to save him, Ella…” I begged my friend, before clearing my voice and stating the obvious: “Hospitals are a no go... But whatever we are going to do, we need supplies”.

No preamble, no ifs or whys. Desperately trying to slow down my racing heart, I forced myself to take longer, deeper breaths through my nose, filling the lower lungs as I had been thought to do in case an imminent panic attack started to make me feel dizzy and lightheaded. I needed my brain to come back online ASAP, and too much oxygen was poison.

“We have already taken care of that,” I heard Ella saying. Her voice echoed in my brain like a distant call in a thick fog.

All I could think about was that wet stain and all those bright-red, deadly flowers blooming everywhere on _my partner_ 's body.

“We?”

“Luce and me,” she almost shrugged the detail off as irrelevant, before clarifying: “He called me while you were tying Barrow again to that chair… Despite the wind noise and the weak signal, I got what he meant: he knew that he was falling straight into another trap, and that he needed backup.” That said, she hinted at something behind her: “I brought my Mary Poppins' bag.”

So he had taken it all upon himself once more, without even being asked, and he had charged headlong aware of what he was risking. That was the Lucifer I knew. Not having a strategy was his quintessential, most effective strategy: he pulled off stunts no human could even attempt, and that element of surprise had saved the day more times than I could count. What an observant "detective" I was…

However, this time it had been too much, even for him: the enemy was in the know, and my partner had tried to warn me of the danger… but I hadn't listened to him, I hadn't believed him. Instead of letting me pay the price of my mistake, he had chosen to bear the consequences in my stead, and it wasn’t even the first time.

 _If he's "Evil incarnate" among Celestials, what kind of monsters does that make of_ us _?_  I asked the Heavens above. I shed a tear, desperately trying to hold back the many ones that were bound to follow the first one.

I reached out to him: my trembling hand hovered over his for a few instants, before I hesitantly brushed those blood-stained knuckles with the tip of my fingers. That gesture felt familiar, comforting, yet so momentous that my brain froze once more: it left me staring at the blue screen of a system crash for a while, before it rebooted. From the outsideI probably looked like a very still, empty shell, staring with glazed eyes at the wall in front of me as if a huge hole had just appeared in the middle of it, and hordes of demons caught in the middle of doing their thing -whatever that was- on the other side had suddenly turned to meet my gaze.

I heard Dan’s sharp inhale behind my back: he had either seen Hell’s demons too, or expected their Lord to rise and tear my arm off its socket for daring to touch him. Quite a biased assumption, considering that the fearsome beast was already letting another human _pet_ it, and that we had just heard it _purr_ in relief while Ella threaded her fingers through its tangled and windswept curls with gentle, soothing motions _._

One of Lucifer’s wings twitched again, maybe reacting to the unexpected contact with another warm, living body daring to touch his. When Dan heard the clink of one more 9mm bullet falling to the floor, he blinked twice before taking a second, even sharpest intake of air through gritted teeth: “How did he even get here, in that state?”

Hearing words from another person’s lips made me tighten my hold on Lucifer's hand: I felt that if I didn’t moor my partner to the dock of our world tightly enough, he would drift away, and the rolling tide would take him where none of us could reach him anymore. No other divinity seemed to give a shit about humans except my inexplicably selfless and trustworthy "guardian Devil": I couldn't care less if half my species considered him to be the apex predator.

“He didn’t have to flap much... He was riding the thermals." Ella’s educated guess caught the tail of Dan's question, a shooting star I hadn't even registered. She was back by default to her nerdy mode: our brilliant forensic scientist was good at rationalizing the craziest stuff as much as I was at compartmentalizing it.

The Grand Master of evasion was Satan himself, though: he never lied, but had a real talent at skirting deftly around the truth, that he snipped and trimmed to the point of self-deception.Forced to witness how much that talent had cost him since the garden of Eden, I slipped my fingers between his long, worryingly cold ones. I had always felt hot blood, vibrant life and raw power pounding under his skin; their absence was so unexpected and _wrong_ it made me flinch. Physical contact had always been a scarce and meaningful occurrence between us, as if we had both implicitly agreed not to hurt each other with the invisible, poisoned spikes we were both wearing to protect ourselves. Almost absent-mindedly, I started stroking his palm with my thumb. When I was a child, my father used to do that whenever I got hurt or sick: he helped me focus on a single sensation, and that simple gesture eased the pain everywhere else.

“Why?” I asked under my breath, choking on the word.

I didn’t even think I had uttered the word aloud, but my daughter answered, and she did it right away, with no hesitation whatsoever: “Cause that’s who he is, mom,” she said, sounding like the only adult in the room, “and it’s not the first time he gets hurt to save us.”

The warehouse. Malcolm.

Lucifer had _died_ there… before “getting better”. No bulletproof vests, no blood packs: his brother had lied about that stunt. Amenadiel. Not an _honest-_ to-God angel, apparently, but an angel nonetheless. Could we trust him? Would he help his sibling, if we prayed to him or send a text to the number he had given to my ex when they hung out together? ‘Cause angels could lie, apparently, while the Devil took pride in sticking to the literal truth.

"Bring my stuff over, Dan," said Ella in a resolute tone while I was still drowning in my own thoughts. I couldn’t seem to get a grip on myself, no matter how hard I tried to clear my mind.

_Damn, Chloe… Focus!_

How could I bring myself to face the enormity of what was happening? Dropped into a scene I most certainly didn’t want to act out, surrounded by unfamiliar props and crumpling the awful script in a vicious grip, I wanted to shout my anger at the incompetent director lurking in the shadows somewhere above. The chances were that I had the Almighty Himself to blame, ‘cause apparently God messed with the lives of heathens and atheists like me, too. Big time.

Dan obeyed mechanically, lifting the heavy bag he found a few steps behind Ella and carelessly dropping it close to her.

"Be careful!" she protested, startled by the loud _thud_. Scolding the poor man was quite useless, considering that he was following the instructions in a daze, and I felt a protective instinct kicking in just because she had raised her voice: suddenly shaken out of my stupor, I bent over Lucifer to cover him, grabbing his forearm on reflex. I wasn't thinking straight: my hand landed a couple inches from the long gash Pierce's (Maze's?) knife had slashed open, still oozing blood and soaking a sleeve of his jet-black jacket. He wasn’t whining about the umpteenth ruined suit only because he was out cold.

Without even noticing my reaction, Ella emptied her “StarWhatever” shoulder bag on the floor. I could hardly believe what came out of it. “What?” she scoffed at my disconcerted expression. “He texted me, too… ‘Fifth shelf, bottom/left, behind Dorian Gray. Gonna need that stuff later.’ Plus a pissed-off Devil emoji.”

And now there was enough “stuff” in my kitchen to throw a rave party.

“Dude… Are you going to help or not?”

Dan ignored Ella’s appeal, at first.He was fidgeting like a lunatic and shifting his weight from one feet to the other; with dilated pupils and furrowed brows, his eyes were still fixed on my hand holding Lucifer’s. “What if it was all just an _act_? What if he was pretending _,_ the whole fucking time?” he hissed, trying to keep his voice low and ending up choking on his own words.

“In that case, the Devil is an even better method actor than I had thought him to be,” was Ella's plain, unimpressed comment.

How could Douchey Dan miss the irony of it? “Pretending to be what, exactly? Himself?” I sneered at him. “And to what purpose? Having the privilege of working with the LAPD and getting occasionally shot or stabbed?”

At a loss, Dan bit his lower lip. “What can he possibly want from us? Coming ‘topside’,” he quoted, “to run a nightclub, play piano and work as a ‘civilian’ consultant for the Homicide Section of the LAPD?” He laughed under his breath, sounding completely unhinged.

“Maybe he was bored?” Having something urgent to do, Ella simply shrugged it off. “Let’s save him first, than you’ll have a literal eternity to ask him whatever you want.” She raised her voice again, and I instantly knew she had pushed too far. Dan lost it: “Charlotte has died, and it’s also _his fault_!” he barked.

That wasn’t true. “He warned me, but I didn’t listen to him. I didn’t believe him.” And I couldn’t forgive myself for being so blind.

“He should have _proved_ it!”

“Maybe he thought better of it.” Now there was an edge to my voice that instantly shut him up. “‘Cause you are reacting _so_ well to him providing actual _evidence._..” I pointed at his blood-stained wings, “...of what he is.” He stopped pacing back and forth and turned to read my expression, finally paying some attention to it. “And who are we to demand something... anything from him?” I added.

Ella was sick and tired of our squabbling. “For God’s sake, Dan! We need help here, ok? _Please_!”

My eyes dropped to Lucifer’s hand: his fingers had contracted under mine, sliding slightly on the floor. When I saw his jaw clenching, I turned toward him and tensed up, holding my breath.

“For _my_ sake… I hope” he groaned, shifting his weight to his elbow in an attempt to lift himself up from Ella’s lap. “Not my father’s...”

He had heard us. The three of us stared at him dumbfounded, not knowing what to do or what to say.

“You know that I’m right _here_ … don’t you?” he scoffed, trying at the same time to catch his breath. Then his voice dropped an octave, letting deeper, bitter, darker tones creep in between the syllables and sending shivers up our spines: “I wasn’t 'bored'..." He opened his eyes, blazing with hellfire again. “I’d had _enough._ ”

There was such a finality to that last word, I felt it sink deep in my bowels: it carried the oppressive weight of millennia of despair, hatred, rage and rejection. Maybe fear, too.

He was willing to do anything not to go back there, dead or alive. “Here” was the only place to be, for him.

Now on his elbows and knees, he swayed, dragged down by the weight of the wing still trapped underneath, but he used the one draped on the floor to steady himself. Both were visibly shivering, but seeing all those muscles bulging and contracting threw me for another loop: they were winding up under smooth, rosy skin, ready to spring and release their power, and me and Ella were close enough to risk being mowed down. For the nth time, an alarm blared “ _Danger! Danger!”_ in my skull, with some flashing, blinding colors added for good measure. I exchanged a quick, startled look with her and I knew she felt the same: like a speck of dust about to be crushed between colliding continents.

However, Lucifer didn’t sharpen the edges of those formidable weapons, nor did he lift them: he let them droop like a cloak, a regal, fluffy mantle hiding how broken he was.

I fell again into the flames burning in those impossible eyes, way too close now. When he turned them on me, I caught a glimpse of an endless abyss engulfed by a scorching heat, and it was like peeking into the deep throat of a volcano. They were windows into an entire different world, and I instinctively recoiled, letting go of his hand and crawling backwards.

As soon as those same eyes took in my reaction, the flames died out. Something much more hurtful took their place: dejection, radiating from his whole body. The poisoned ashes of a nuclear winter suffocated the heat burning inside of him, draining the power he was drawing from himself to fight that battle to the end… It was like snuffing out a candle.

“I… ’msorry, Ms. Lopez,” he slurred, breaking that contact to look at the blood-smeared floor. “I didn’t mean to...”

He didn’t finish the sentence. It took him all he had to slide a knee underneath himself and shift the weight of his body to his arms before it dragged him down again. Attempting the heavy lifting stunt needed to get back on his feet seemed too much, but he gave it a try, and he more or less managed to stand up.

Dan seemed to be strangely unaffected by his movements, as if he had had enough of trembling in fear in a corner and hiding behind the muzzle of his gun, now back in the holster. Maybe he was past both the denial and the anger stage, and he was finally willing to bargain.

Hiding the shame of not being able to stay upright on his own, Lucifer went back to his old, whiny self: “Bloody Hell… Is that how it feels when you humans get really wasted?” Slumped against the closest wall, he was as pale as the wedding gown of a virgin bride. “Remind me not to drink too much, when the Detective is around,” he gave me a dirty look.

What was that supposed to mean?

Ella voiced her objection before I came up with mine: “You drink booze like… all the time, and you’ve never even gotten tipsy?”

“Maybe...” He was standing on his own feet, now, except for the hand planted against the wall as a fail-safe. “But it normally takes the whole bar.”

Lux. LA’s most famous, exclusive, glamorous nightclub, not just any “bar”.

“ _Of course_ he drinks the entire top shelf and doesn’t get drunk,” I heard Dan sneer right behind me.

“Awful, isn’t it?” The club’s owner sounded genuinely displeased.

Grumpy Lucifer Morningstar was a handful, but far easier to handle than a pissed-off Celestial on a rampage. Better the Devil you know than the Devil you still have to figure out.

Too bad that Daniel seemed dead set on exasperating him: “Is there something, _anything_ that tips you off balance?”

“Getting shot by multiple machine guns can do the trick, I guess. At least when I’m vulnerable...”

“When,” I echoed, before adding a mental _“Why?”_ and filing it in the “things to ask later” folder.

I would have rolled my eyes, if the situation hadn’t been so dire. I had done that a lot, since I’d met Lucifer Morningstar.

I had gotten past the edge of sanity and left it so far behind the horizon that I couldn’t see it anymore, hidden by the Earth’s curvature. But the fucking Multiverse (heavenly and hellish planes included) wasn’t done with me, ‘cause my doorbell choose that moment to ring. Once. Twice.

“Are you in, Chloe?” I heard a familiar voice calling from outside.

With the Devil still hell-bent on collecting the sharp, scattered shards of his pride and heading for that same door, three limp bodies hanging from the furniture and the ceiling, blood smeared practically everywhere, my colleague still stranded on the floor and surrounded by zip-lock baggies full of suspicious pills and powders, not to mention my ex-husband looking frantic with a gun in plain sight, all I wanted was scream. I did, mentally, and I pulled my hair making an even worse mess of it.

“Oh dear,” commented the rebel angel who never swore. I would have _paid_ to hear him utter some proper profanities with that posh British accent of his, for a change, but that was enough: I grabbed is uninjured arm and maneuvered him to hide beneath the corner. All his body tensed up at the unexpected contact: I felt that he could have ignored that sudden jerk and stayed where he was like an unyielding boulder; instead, he gave in, still sticking to his pretense of being human.

I had always been able to stop him, when it really mattered. He’d listened to me even when he didn’t agree. He trusted me. A human. How? Why?

I heard his hot, labored breath close to my neck, the unsettling light in those eyes dimming a little, the metallic smell of blood blending with his own, intoxicating and oh-so familiar scent.

_Too close…_

“Is everything all right? We’ve heard some strange noises...”

Of course the neighbors had to show up and add themselves to the long list of flagged boxes of that cosmic fuckup.

With Dan swearing in English under his breath, Ella in Spanish and a being older than time politely expressing his annoyance at the current situation, I caught my daughter in the act of trotting to the door with a bounce in her steps and a confident “Don’t worry, I’ll handle this” look on her face.

“We were about to call the police, but we know your child and your housemate can be quite loud, when they play together” insisted the female, middle-aged voice outside.

I watched the scene unfold in slow motion right before my eyes, but it was too late to do anything.

There was no chain Trixie could slide in a rack before opening, but I had added one she could reach and hook to the handle when we had moved in: she did it before pulling the door slightly ajar to peek outside, and just to be safe, she leaned against it so that nobody could step past her and inside. _Smart girl_. “That’s when me and Maze _train_ together,” she corrected them, ignoring the fact that she and her friend were on rocky grounds at the moment. “She’s teaching me some very cool moves: I’m quite good at throwing kniv...”

“Trix,” I cut her short with a nervous giggle from behind the corner. “Would you come here and help me clean up?”  
Mazikeen. The actual _demon from Hell_ babysitting my daughter. The King’s bodyguard and second-in-command, no less. Come to think of it, my baby might have actually learned how to throw blades and break limbs, while I thought she was just playing around.

Trixie wasn’t finished with the nosy neighbors, though: “Mom and dad _are_ the police,” she reminded them. “They are detectives from the Homicide Division and they have an _awesome_ civilian consultant helping them catch the bad guys… How cool is that?” she grinned.

Catching me completely off-guard, the fluffy down of Lucifer’s wings puffed up.He flashed his trademark smirk, letting himself slip into his smug, boyish persona again, and well, just… _wow._

 _Too close, definitely._ So close I could smell that inebriating, sinfully angelic scent I’d been always tempted to bask in, a blend of dark chocolate and lime blossom with a tangy hint of ginger that wasn’t chocolate, flowers or ginger at all, but something uniquely his. Gone was the faint smell of incense and ash I thought I had gotten a whiff of when he had let hellfire burn him from within.

“You know, Chloe, that housemate of yours is quite…” Ms. Nosy struggled to find an adjective, “...bizarre.” Hilarious choice of adjective.

Before an annoyed Beatrice shut the door in our neighbor's faces (despite what they had recently gone through, she still doted on her badass demonic bestie), I was almost tempted to ask them out loud: “Since you’re here, do you have any gauzes, towels and disinfectants to spare?” I had a seriously injured angel to look after, barely on his feet and looking straight into my soul with an uncomprehending, uncertain, shyly hopeful expression. I used to backpedal and pat him awkwardly when he looked at me like with that bright, adoring look on his face, but I couldn’t do that, now, andI wasn’t equipped to deal with a doe-eyed creature from Hell trying to steal my soul without even meaning to.

I should have been the one to notice that said creature was trapping my body, not only my soul: that very battered and distressed immortal was leaning on his spread palms, planted against the wall on both sides of me, but he was the first to register that detail, not me. Startled, he let a hand drop and hastily tried to pull back, letting out a skittish “sorry” that almost made me laugh at the cosmic absurdity of it all.

There was something so wrong with my survival instinct that the Devil himself seemed taken aback: he looked at me as if I had grown the horns and the tail he didn’t sport.

I remembered to breath, but right after an averted crisis, another one swept in, literally dragging me down with its weight.He couldn’t help it: flailing in a failed attempt to keep their owner on his feet, both his wings ended up engulfing me and clinging instinctively to my upper body. It didn’t feel like floating in a pearly cloud of fluff, ‘cause I found myself plunging my hands into all that white to find something solid underneath and grab it, whatever it was. With is 6’ 3’’ height and his lean and muscular, imposing frame, Lucifer towered over me when he was standing: that meant that when I caught him, he was already halfway to the ground.

A lightning bolt shot through all my nerves, and it had nothing to do with the physical strain.

 _Divinity_.

I was overwhelmed by it: vertigo hit me like a wave and I felt the ground rising up to swallow me.

I wasn’t at my limit… I was far, far beyond it.

“Call us if you need anything,” added the voice from before, fading away as the neighbors finally turned away from our closed door.

“Thanks!” I croaked, straining my voice to be heard, then added through my teeth: “A forklift, maybe…?” Lucky me, the console table was close enough: I felt a sharp, stinging pain when I bumped my hip into it, but at least I got to lean against it and made it carry part of the weight after breaking Lucifer’s fall. It took me a few moments to realize that his left wing had moved the same way as my arm had, sliding its long feathered "fingers" on the wooden surface and wrenching itself between it and ourselves to bear most of the weight. It was visibly trembling.

About to succumb, I let out a desperate, strangled “Help, _please_!”

That’s when I realized that Dan was holding by her waist not me, but a wildly writhing, loudly protesting Trixie.

“I can’t do this alone, for fuck’s sake!”

Sliding again towards the edge of the cliff and close to taking the leap into unconsciousness for the second time in a row, Lucifer started at the harsh sound of my voice, making me instantly regret yelling at the useless member of my species I had reproduced with. "Shh… It's OK," I whispered, close to his ear. Eyes shut and gritted teeth, he was struggling not to collapse and drag me to the floor with him. "I got you," I said, with an arm wrapped around him and the other hand gripping the edge of the table with white knuckles. Hearing those words, he let out a desperate, frustrated moan before surrendering and leaning his forehead against my shoulder, where he seemed to find some relief.

He had already given me that impression when he had tried to excuse himself and flee the scene, no matter the chances to get somewhere alive, but now I knew for certain that my partner was as terrified as we were. He didn't want us to see him like that.

"He can't stand, Ella, and the floor or my couch aren't an option," I appealed to my other friend, the one who had immediately scrambled to her feet when Lucifer had almost fainted again, but only to freeze and stare open-mouthed at two of us embracing each other in a cloud of white fluff.

She started, then nodded.

The choice was quite obvious: Trixie’s bed wasn’t big enough and Maze’s lair looked like a torture chamber more than a hospital room.

"If you're not going to help with this, Dan, you can take care of Pierce's goons," I instructed him. They were still alive, or so it seemed. "Bring them to the precinct and rack your brains to come up with a statement that doesn't make you sound like a babbling lunatic…”

“How am I even supposed to get them down from where they are?” he scoffed, looking back at the pair of legs hanging from the skylight without letting go of his still wriggling, frustrated daughter.

"Not my problem."

He tried again from a different angle: “And what if this house is not safe?”

That last objection made sense, admittedly.

With a loud sigh, he finally let go of Trixie, trusting her to read the situation like the adult he was _not_. He met the pair of doe eyes looking up at him: “My daughter’s best friends are the Devil and the Devil’s freaking _bodyguard_ ,” he said. “I have _the right_ to freak out.” Then he raised his gaze and let it wander on the wall right behind the slumping, semi-conscious Archangel I was holding in my arms: it was covered with Trixie’s colorful drawings up to the ceiling. Maze and her curved knives were practically everywhere, at least as much as the rainbows and unicorns he’d have expected to find, and in many _family_ pictures Lucifer sported something suspiciously, disturbingly similar to, well… huge, snowy-white wings.

The latter was still responsive enough to follow Dan’s gaze and line of thought: “Nobody else is going to come after us… I made sure of that,” he cut in. “And me and Mazikeen don’t mean any harm to the little urchin. We would do anything to keep her safe.” He moved aside the tip of the feathered, shivering limb Trixie’s eyes were fixed upon and met her gaze. Then he erupted in an indignant, thunderous rumble meant to reproach the person daring to think otherwise: “I hope that this at least is crystal clear,” he glared at her father.

Ella and me were next in line. He cleared his voice and forcibly made it lose its edge, not wanting to scare us. “I can’t hide them away, but just help me find a way to go back to Lux, and I’ll take care of the problem myself” he said, taking a long breath and sounding tired, resigned. “Calling a cab won’t do it… Most likely, I won’t fit into one,” was his weak attempt at cracking a joke.

“What are you talking about, Luce…?” Ella’s hesitant voice carried implications that she probably didn't mean to share yet. Like half the precinct, she had heard Lucifer whine for weeks about having to play whack-a-mole against the "pesky things" constantly regrowing on this back, and we had the same dark, horrifying suspicion lurking in the back of our minds.

Her former friend and colleague acknowledged her question with a defeated sigh, before shifting his gaze to meet mine: "It's not the first time that I cut them off" he reminded us, making a shiver run up my spine. “I don’t think they’ll grow back, this time… but it was worth it: I used them to save you and your spawn, Chloe, and trust me, it’s more than enough.”

 _Chloe._ My own name stabbed me in the guts like a sharp knife, and he noticed, feeling my body tense against his. The pearly down of his wings cocooned us like an incredibly soft mantle, but I saw the shafts of the smallest feathers rise like a wave on alert.

"I've killed a human…" he added, tentatively. He made it sound like some sort of explanation, something both of us were supposed to face.

 _"In self-defense,"_ I silently mouthed, not daring to contradict him aloud.

A _punishment_. He was asking for it, maybe already inflicting it upon himself as we spoke.

No way in literal Hell. Or Heaven. Or wherethefuckingever.

“You won’t,” I blurted out. I knew what my fingers had found, hidden between the thin, silky lining and the fine Italian wool of his designer jacket: Maze’s blade, crazy-sharp and still stained with Marcus’ blood. And I knew what he wanted to use it for. “I won’t let you.”

Ordering a freaking Archangel around: it sounded bat-shit crazy. Certifiably nuts. But now that I knew that he wasn’t just speaking in metaphors, I was terrified: he was seriously thinking of cutting two of his limbs with a knife. Hacking flesh and muscles, dislocating and tearing joints apart, wrenching the equivalent of both his legs or his arms away from his body and… what? Throwing them away with the garbage? Burning them? The image sank a hook in my heart and pulled it out of my chest, together with a useless pair of lungs refusing to expand and a tight knot of twisted guts. I needed to run to the bathroom and lift the lid in three seconds flat if I didn't want to throw up right there on my living room’s floor.

“If you care about our partnership, you’ll listen to me… even if it’s the last time." My voice was trembling, like all the rest of m body. "You’ll let us help.”

 _Partnership?_ I read on his lips. His brows furrowed in a nonplussed, disbelieving expression.

Admittedly, the word sounded ludicrous for a zillion different reasons, like a worn-out, cringey joke I shouldn’t have mentioned out loud anymore, now that I was in on it.

However, I wasn’t backing off. Not this time. Not anymore.

I couldn’t imagine how much pain he must have been through when I wasn't there to protect him from himself: I trusted him to be loyal, then, but not honest, and I was so, so sorry for that. I knew it was like standing in front of an incoming flood and hoping to stop it by pushing against it, but no matter the odds of changing his mind, I couldn’t let him hurt himself more than he already had.

“Why don’t you let us try, Luce?” Ella echoed my words, testing the waters. She wasn't begging him: she was trying to explore his reasons. There had to be something else we didn't know.

Lucifer knew she wasn't calling his intentions nor his trust in her and me into question, but he snapped anyway at that question. Blending innumerable harmonics together and resonating between the walls of that room like the organ of an immense cathedral, his voice hit us with the rising tide of his frustrated anger: “Cause if I did, I would _kill_ you!” It struck like a bolt piercing the clouds and falling straight from the sky, making every single nerve in my body fire at the same time. Too close, too sinister, too unhuman.

The air seemed to crackle, in the following silence. His eyes were two beacons of searing light, so bright we had to turn ours away, but I didn’t let go of him, I didn’t step back.

I was still holding him, and his whole body was radiating an unbearable heat against mine: I swallowed, looking down at my arm around his waist and feeling that contact way too much. For an instant, I felt like a wild animal that had triggered the hefty springs of a leg-hold trap and got caught in its jaws: no hope of getting away, unless I teared my own limb off.

Then, avoiding his, my gaze wandered along the wall and set by chance on the small table we were leaning against. That was when I suddenly realized what he meant: the long primary feathers at the tip of his left wing had skidded in an arch along the smooth wooden surface, cutting through it like a sharp katana slicing the flimsiest paper.

What I considered to be a sturdy, solid piece of furniture chose that exact moment to give in under our combined weight: it cracked along the slash and literally fell apart, half of it toppling over and crashing on the floor with a loud, startling _bam._

 

 

 


	6. Are We All the Same?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucifer's POV, this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the beautiful, powerful, heart-wrenching song that inspired this fiction (together with “When the Truth Hunts You Down”) and this chapter in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2wlmiDMB6k
> 
> “Lonely” by Nathan Wagner
> 
> Is everybody lonely?  
> Is everybody scared?  
> Is everybody worried  
> that no one really cares?  
> See I'm afraid to love but afraid to be alone  
> Still I wonder why my heart is always broke  
> What a way to live, let the fear take all control  
> This ain't life, no  
> I'm not alive  
> Are we all the same?  
> Looking for love, looking for love  
> Are we all in chains?  
> Trying to be enough, be enough  
> Trying to write my perfect story  
> I'm working nights I'm working days  
> to prove the world that I am worthy  
> of being seen of being praise  
> 'Cause I'm afraid to show the people who I am  
> I'm not special just a simple broken man  
> So I will hide my face with my picture perfect mask  
> This ain't life, no  
> It's just a lie  
> Are we all the same?  
> Looking for love, looking for love  
> Are we all in chains?  
> Trying to be enough, be enough
> 
> If I looked you in the eye  
> and showed the broken things inside  
> would you run away?  
> Would you run away?
> 
> If you saw my darkest parts  
> the wicked things inside my heart  
> would you run away?  
> Or are you the same?

 

 

I let that moment crystallise, harden and shatter, holding my breath while I looked over the edge I’d almost pushed myself off.

I wasn’t human, far from it, and I’d just screamed my true nature out loud. I’d torn that crevice open myself, like I used to do when I lashed out in Hell and let the aftershocks of my wrath shape it in its own image, as ragged and broken as my own skin. A gaping wound I didn’t know how to stitch back together, and I couldn’t hide it, I couldn’t step around it.

I shouldn’t have used _that_ voice _._ I shouldn’t have channelled my darkest powers to demand obedience. Not on Earth. Not from _my friends_.

Now there was no bridge to cross, not anymore: I had cut loose whatever fragile connection might still exist between us. The gap, the abyss was there, even wider, and standing alone on the other side, I could only stare down into its mouth or wait for its jaws to snap. Not even Hell’s ragged, constantly shifting terrain had ever let a soul plunge into such an endless, gaping pit of despair: that was a punishment fit only for its king.

My hands would have shot up and grabbed my temples, plunging into the hair, if they hadn’t been paralysed, useless.

I was about to Fall. Again. And nothing could hurt more than that feeling, not even the whole throbbing, aching expanse of my shredded wings. I had had to put myself under a cruel spell to make it there on broken bones and missing feathers: another creature belonging to the abyss and pretending to be human, another foolish mermaid dancing on sharp knives to win a life under the sun. Now I was so on edge and in pain that the barbs of my pinion feathers had closed ranks like soldiers before a battle: the sharpest blades the Universe had ever forged belonged to a living being, and that being was in no state to keep them in check.

I couldn’t put my weapons down and surrender, and they were too close to the Detective than I liked them to be. “I just… can’t,” I uttered under my breath, like an echo of my own thoughts, with such a different voice I guess she didn’t even hear it, through the haze of shock.

My clenched palms were damp with cold sweat; I had a strange tingling sensation running from the tip of my fingers up to my wrists. I had frozen on the spot, trying not to scare those surprisingly resilient humans even more, but I was suddenly feeling way too human myself. What was happening to me? There was one single creature in Dad’s creation who could rein in the Devil’s wrath with her mere presence, but that feeling wasn’t anger… It was something different, something much _worse_. I couldn’t fight it even with her on my side to keep me grounded, provided she was still willing to help.

My chest was heaving in rapid, shallow breaths that threatened to burst into agonizing, racking sobs. I needed to stifle them, to get a grip of myself. They couldn't see me like this. They weren't supposed to see me at all, in that form, a partly angelic, partly devilish, partly mortal mess. Nobody had, ever... not even Maze, and she had seen _a lot_ , since I had plunged into that burning lake.

That deafening silence was going to stretch unbearably long, but I could do nothing to fill it. The only things I heard were my ragged breathing and the roaring sound between my temples.

Dread was my demons' best tool: even more effective than actual, physical torture. The worst Hell loops were the ones that let the guilty souls fear the pain before inflicting it on them, imagine the silence before casting them into an endless void, conjure the image of their loved ones before taking them away, again and again. Foreshadowing was the sharpest blade forged downstairs, ‘cause Dad didn’t bother to enforce his Laws, but had a wicked sense of payback when the damage was done.

Stuffed just round the corner of my mind, I had eons of seclusion and alienation to relive on playback: the pile could crumble all at once and crush me under its weight. I knew my punishment was going to be exactly that… Another eternity of loneliness.

The flames were creeping all over my skin again: my soul was leaking Hellfire and starlight as much as the wounds were oozing blood. I wiped the tears swelling at the corner of my burning eyes with the back of a hand, mixing my monstrous, divine and (temporarily) human condition together. Three different planes of existence, three different worlds. If divine and physical manifestations didn’t mix, if they weren’t _meant_ to coexist, what was I? What kind of cosmic aberration was I becoming?

I didn’t want to shed tears in front of an audience, so I waited in silence, keeping my eyes tightly shut but feeling even more as a result, inside and outside of me.

The light of my stars and the darkness of space, the heat of their cores and the cold void between them… Desire and punishment, free will and chains, the faint echo of Heavenly choirs and the deafening roar of Infernal hordes... I yearned to be whole, but I was disintegrating, crumbling, and if I couldn’t make sense of the contradictions that were tearing me apart, a bunch of humans couldn’t certainly handle them.

That wasn't the first time I had tried to blend in with Dad's little playthings, as fascinating as they were, but I'd always been prevented from getting too close, before. This time was different. I had finally savored the taste of freedom, found a home and maybe even a new family… I had let myself _care_ , and that had been both my strength and my downfall. There was no going back from that.

Casting me out of the Silver City and into a literal lake of fire hadn’t been enough to settle the score: dear Dad had devised the perfect plan to break me for good, and it was far more subtle, twisted and vile. I was bound to screw up, and when I did, he just needed to hand me a fast-lane, non-refundable ticket to Hell. One-way only, this time. His creatures knew that instinctively.... Even their stupid games got that part right: the final monster had to be taken down, not reasoned with, certainly not helped. There was no saving an abomination like me, and humans knew better than to try.

So that was it. That was the moment when they suddenly realized the absurdity of staying that close to the ultimate villain, the moment when they dropped everything and run for their lives.

Except they didn't.

I cracked open one eye, after a while. One... cautiously... then the other.

The Detective hadn’t run away. She hadn’t even _stepped_ away, actually. The only sentient being my powers didn’t affect was still wrapped around my body: she hadn’t let go of my far too heavy, far too hot frame, and I had no idea what to make of it.

She was probably scalding herself, pressed against that burning furnace, but she didn’t seem to mind it, or consider it enough of a reason to pull back.

Ella and Dan still looked far too terrified to react in any intelligible way, but they hadn’t fled the scene either.

Things didn’t compute in my brain, at all, but a voice made me snap to attention, forcing me to shut the jaw that was starting to go slack in awe: “Flying…” it said, sounding shivering and shy.“How is it like?”

I was so taken aback by the question that the aforesaid jaw dropped, quite literally. “What?” was the only sound I managed to push through my tight throat.

Ella had come out of her frozen state; fidgeting with her hands and struggling to meet my gaze, she cleared her voice twice before stammering: “I mean… Is it like... swimming... in a way?”

Overwhelmed by the feeling of Chloe’s arm still wrapped around my waist, I was so baffled I couldn’t come up with anything coherent.

Ella’s brain was probably a mushy goo sloshing in her skull like mine, ‘cause she was fidgeting so much I felt the urge to bear-hug her like she always did to me, at least to make her stop. I was already wired enough on my own, and that wasn’t helping. “There’s always the... theoretical possibility to fall to the bottom...” she said. _Fall._ Really? I arched an eyebrow at her unfortunate choice of topic, and she noticed. “...to _drown_ ,” she hastily corrected herself. “But... you trust your limbs and your technique enough to dive anyway, don’t you?”

Ok, I finally got it: the ever-resourceful forensic scientist had chosen to handle me with care. Utmost care. Like she did with explosive stuff wired to ticking timers.

I let out a sigh, but I might have stifled a giggle underneath it, too. “I’m not a bomb to defuse, Ms. Lopez...” There had never been a disarming procedure in my user manual (faulty design, if you asked me), but I did feel relieved. “I’m just… well… _me_.”

…And that was embarrassing.

“I know… Luce...” She gave herself a visible push to keep on talking: “But the mood right now was a little… _intense_ , wasn’t it?”

I sighed again, and what I added didn’t sound any less awkward: “It _is_ like swimming… in a way,” I quoted her rambling nonsense, grateful to her for breaking the silence no matter the topic. “It’s risky, and it takes some skills and effort...” I had no idea where she was going with this, but I was desperate to find a connection, to make them feel that I was still in there, that I was still myself, inside that terrifying, alien shell set aflame from within. The uncanny valley was an easier place to climb out than the far deeper pit of pure Lovecraftian horror. “I hadn’t done it in a while...” My atrophied muscles could testify to that. “It was exciting... liberating,” I wasn’t used to struggle with words, “and _it hurt like a bitch_ ”.

Too dumbfounded not to stray onto other thoughts, I wondered what all that meant, but my partner’s arm kept me grounded, giving me a good squeeze: “So… no cutting wings. Deal?”

And suddenly, I got what they meant. “ _Well played, girls_ , _”_ I almost said out loud, proud of them both. Technically, I had to get something out of a “deal”, but if I followed their logic, that was my own physical integrity. The terms weren’t clear enough to meet the requirements of a proper deal with the Devil, but I wasn’t going to collect their souls anyway, nor anybody else’s, so I went with it without explicitly agreeing.

I looked at Daniel, still stuck in an ominous silence, just to make sure he wasn’t reaching for his gun again. His thoughts were so naked they had probably been dancing all over his face and stripteasing since I had raised my voice at him. I could tuned in to them almost as easily as though he were actually praying to me, swear words included…The guy didn’t know the first thing about addressing a proper prayer to a Celestial being, but I didn’t find it in me to take offence, this time.

I felt Chloe’s hand traveling up my spine, right between my shoulder blades and my wings, and I tensed up on reflex, like a mast hit by a wall of sea water and weighted down by the tattered, drenched sails of a sinking ship. “We get those bullets out, and we’ll all feel better,” she added, standing so close and letting her hand wander close to that white mantle without daring to touch it.

So that’s what it was all about. They didn’t want to be indebted to the Devil... “I didn’t do it because I expected something in return,” I tried protesting, but they just seemed confused.

Daniel’s gaze shifted uncomfortably all around the room, as if he didn’t want to deal with the implications of that sentence, while Ella got closer, letting an arm slide along her hips, limp, in an astonished pose that bordered on melodramatic. Craning her neck to meet my still burning eyes with a suspicious frown, she said: “What are you talking about, big guy?” She caught a breath, steeling herself, then lifted that same arm and poked my chest with her index finger.

Like a brick wall, I didn’t move an inch, and her half-undone ponytail bobbed behind her neck when she bounced back with a baffled and even more confused expression, probably pondering the fact that the action/reaction law of physics didn’t apply equally to a petite human girl and a brawny supernatural being.

I did move when humans pushed me, usually, but only because I let them. However, when Chloe adjusted her grasp around my waist, I had no objections: I felt very dizzy and unsteady, at the moment, for several different reasons… The world was blurry around the edges. “You saved our asses. Trying to fix you is the least we can do,” she said, giving me a stern look.

My favorite human wasn’t that foul-mouthed, usually, but I found it endearing in its own way. I tried resuscitating my smug smile, buried somewhere: “ _Bossy_ Detective...” Mouth slightly open and eyes wide, _almost_ daring to feel relieved, I tried following their lead: I gave it a go and stepped on the minefield stretching between us, hoping to get to the their side without setting one off. “The Devil likes a good spank!” I cranked my accent up a notch in the playful, allusive fashion they were familiar with. Pouring my charm into it without the feline grace, the hypnotic gaze and the sensual purring I usually lured my preys with was a risky bet… My (probably) flaming eyes and (possibly) black sclerae didn’t add to the much-needed levity, but I put a good effort into the trademark smirk, desperately hiding how much my hands trembled and how wobbly I felt. Literally any joke would have fallen flat, what with the mood, the gore and the unconscious audience still hanging from the ceiling window and the smashed furniture, but there was no helping it.

“And the Devil is damn hea…” she stopped and corrected herself, “... _awfully_ heavy, so it’s time to put him _to bed_.” A look of pure horror washed her expression away as soon as she dawned on her what word had just came out of her mouth: “Ok, I regretted that as soon as I said it,” she figuratively raised her hands (both busy at the moment).

Dan’s choice of words was even worse, given that each one of us felt singled-out, and nobody was: “Are you for real?” he scoffed at the three (conscious) adults in the room, earning himself a questioning look by the fourth culprit, his own daughter.

We just ignored him.

The spell hadn’t worked, but at least I had their unfiltered attention. “That stuff from the penthouse won’t knock me out for good, not even with the Detective ar…” I stopped before divulging too much.. “Did you think a human could indulge in all those unhealthy pleasure for years without falling apart? I’m _not_ a ‘surprisingly’ functioning alcoholic and drug addict,” I held Chloe’s gaze, still boring sternly into mine in an outstaring match that made me even more uncomfortable. “I can barely feel the kick, normally.”

If her disapproving frown made me flinch, I blamed it on the injuries.

“You don’t really want a half-conscious monster trashing the neighbourhood...” That at least was something we could easily agree on, wasn’t it?

Nope. Chloe’s frown got even deeper. “Bed. Now,” she ordered in her most authoritative voice, giving me the “mom look” she gave to her spawn after the nth rerun of Frozen or the nth tantrum thrown to extort more chocolate cake.

I usually let her call the shots… Problem was, this time she couldn’t have it her way. “It’s too dangerou…” She attempted to pull my dead weight along without even letting me finish the sentence.

“ _Bed_ ,” she said for the third time in a row, not even shying away from my innuendos anymore. “Would you help me out, Ella?” After watching her colleague take on the fearsome King of Hell without even flinching, she probably thought she was game too.

Putting her life or Ella’s on the line was out of question, but the two women seemed to have thrown their usually impeccable reasoning skills out of the window, and I found myself quite literally digging in my heels to stop that nonsense. Were they deaf or something?

“We’ll take the risks, whatever they are. It’s up to us to decide. That’s _free will_ for you...” Chloe said straight to my face.

That was a low blow. “No, you won’t...” I felt that beastly growl rise again from my chest. “Not this time.”

“Why?” she countered, exasperated.

Cornered, I panicked and said it out loud: “‘Cause it’s _not worth it_!”

Bollocks…

“ _I am_ not worth it,” was what they probably heard anyway. Their expressions told me that much. Even Daniel's.

"You know, man…" Was my name taboo for the Douche, now? "Maybe you could… you should give yourself some credit. You saved my daughter and my wife."

Not that douchey, surprisingly....

"Your _ex_ wife".

I had always corrected him on that point, but this time he seemed strangely taken by surprise by the fact that I insisted. He ended up joining the two women in their frankly frustrating stubbornness: "Can you heal with all those bullets stuck in your muscles and your bones?" he asked in a matter-of-fact tone.

Was the claim that I never lied finally getting into that thick skull of his, too? Talk about “miracles”...

I didn’t say anything, and that was enough of an answer for him and the others.

“I cannot stuff those three guys in my car and bring them to the precinct: someone has to stand guard. Apart from that...” Daniel still seemed to hesitate, but Trixie said it in his stead: “How can we help?”

A child’s plea. Great. What the Hell was I supposed to do with it?

“I’m sorry for having the Ultimate Answer about Life, the Universe and Everything…” I muttered, trying not to wink at Ella, “...literally crash-land in front of you.”

And I was even more sorry that it wasn’t “42”.

“An apology? From Lucifer Morningstar? That’s new.” Still fumbling with my thoughts like scattered Lego blocks that wouldn’t fit together, I barely registered Dan’s sarcasm.

What came out of my mouth sounded like a confession, even more than an apology: “I was worried,” and many other things. “I couldn’t think straight...” But now I was being a responsible devil: “You don’t have anything to be afraid of anymore, I can assure you that much. You’re safe… until you touch the keen toys my Dad gave me to play with.” No innuendos, not even when mentioning sui generis endowments and body parts: only a warning. Responsible, reasonable devil indeed... “I don’t know why the Almighty Prick made them like this, if he wanted me to be His obedient plaything, but these things are deadly.” I lifted a wingtip and made the shiny barbs of a few pinions snap together to make my point. “You have no way of restraining me, and I won’t let you get close to them if I can’t keep them from harming you.”

Even with a set of the Universe’s sharpest kitchen knives under her nose, Chloe seemed to ponder my reasoning for a few instants, then shrug it off without letting it affect her decision. She looked me in the eyes as if to make sure that I got the message: “You rarely say the entire truth, but what you say _is_ always true, or at least you think it is… So indulge me for once and trust me to be honest: if you hurt yourself even more, that’s _on me_ , and I feel guilty enough as it is.”

Her words hit me like a ton of bricks. “But it’s _not_ your fault...” My resolve suddenly faltered, and my wing drooped with it.

“Guilt”... That word stopped my train of thought right before it entered a tunnel it wouldn’t get out of. My eyes went wide at the sudden realization: it felt like derailing, but it saved me from being crushed under a landslide further ahead. How could Hell’s ruler have missed to see it? My shoulders sagged, and I let out a sigh, murmuring: “I can’t be the one to burden your soul with it”.

So that was it. I had no choice, and being deprived of my agency was what I hated the most. I looked up at the ceiling, loathing myself and my father for putting me in that position _again_ , but I surrendered. I literally deflated.

There was no way out. I would never, ever let them come to harm, so I had to endure it. “None of you has actually stood guard since you came in, and nobody needs to, even if you’re one devil down,” I implicitly admitted my defeat.

I had just said the words, when I saw the sofa moving as though someone had bumped into it. Shy and clumsy as always…

I lowered my gaze on Dan’s weapon: “Your gun has been trained on me all the time, Daniel… Am I the only threat?”

He startled, acknowledging far too late that _no_ , I wasn’t.

"There are no demons lurking in the shadows, if that's what you're worried about,” I tried not to spread the panic. “Not even Maze."

Maze…

I didn't know what to think of her disappearance. The curved dagger Cain had so graciously returned was her favourite one, the weapon she usually carried on herself even at Lux, hidden under her scanty “dominatrix” clothes, and she would never lose sight of a blade forged in Hell, or give it to someone else. That thing could kill any Celestial, even her former lord and master.

“There are no demons around, but you don’t need to worry about Cain’s men, either. If they stick their noses in here again, they’ll regret it now _and_ in their afterlives.”

Chloe pressed against my side in a silent “I believe you”, or even “I trust you”, and I felt her voice before even hearing it, as if my aching ribcage were its sound box: “Just go, Daniel. We’ll be fine,” she said. When I heard those words, that same ribcage forgot how to expand and the lungs how to pull air in, even if I needed the oxygen more than ever, with her so close and the blood loss catching up to my angelic powers.

“Take Beatrice with you,” I added, knowing what was coming. The kid had seen enough.

I was physically and mentally exhausted... My only hope was that he rolled with it without question.

“Wait a moment,” the little girl cut in, hearing her name after being ignored so long. She wriggled free of her father’s hands, that were resting limply on her shoulders. “Before you grownups kick me out…”

“Trixie!” was scolded by both her parents in unison.

“...can you do _that_ again?” she went on, meeting my gaze and literally bouncing with excitement. “It was _so cool!_ ”

She didn’t even flinch, looking straight into the Hellfire blazing in my pupils, but her mother’s glare almost froze her on the spot. Almost. “Maybe later...?” she added with an impish smile missing two teeth.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My first attempt at ignoring the automatic spell checker and writing in British English. If I made any mistakes, I hope that Luce will forgive me (and you're welcome to point them out).  
> I'm Italian, by the way... :-)


	7. Hurts Like Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Dear Lord of the whole freaking Multiverse... Your son is a mess. Care to explain?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Hurts Like Hell” by Fleurie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUlX8ltm_JU 

 

 

I’d never had a partner who would shield me with his body from a gang of thugs armed with machine guns. Nobody had… except Chloe. 

Taking a bullet in place of a fellow cop was the most selfless thing a member of the Police Force could do on the field, enough to earn him (or her) the utmost respect among his colleagues, whether he survived the stunt or not. Taking _dozens_? That was overdoing it, at least for a human being, but it was the only reason why Chloe was still alive. 

“No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” A quote from the Epistles I still remembered. I hadn’t been to church in, like, forever.

Did the Devil have a masochistic streak? ‘Cause if he was toying with us silly, puny humans, his long game was way beyond my comprehension. What “Lucifer Morningstar” had done to save _his partner_ was nuts, even for his standards, and he didn’t look fine and dandy at all, for a supposedly immortal, invulnerable being as old as time itself. Even with both the two women’s help, climbing those steps was torture, and the Torturer in chief was on the receiving end of it. I watched him take one step at the time and hold the railing in such a crushing grip that he bent it, when he stopped to take a breath: I felt a shiver run up my spine, seeing the deep indentations left by his fingers in the steel handrail.

The white mantle draping his shoulders was not an immaculate ermine cape, nor the dark spots scattered on it were black-tipped tails… His huge wings were an incredible mass of twitching and twisting details, something painfully _alive_ : I could finally take them in, now that their ethereal, hypnotic light had dimmed a little, and they were far more regal than the robe of a king. Not that their owner needed a fur cloak or a crown, to rule what was probably the largest and most crowded of all kingdoms.

I didn’t know what was more mind-bending: the fact that such a creature had helped us, or the fact that it now needed our help.

He had lit the galaxies, and he needed to _breathe_ ? Even the wildest fantasy writers cared for internal coherence… but that was reality, a reality bent to the capricious, fanciful imagination of an Almighty Author, and what He created out of nothing didn’t _need_ to make sense.

“Can angels die?” My daughter’s words still haunted me. What if the archangel posing a threat to God himself _did_ succumb to blood loss like just another gunshot vic, upstairs, in my ex-wife’s bedroom? Would the death of the Adversary tip the balance on a cosmic scale? That was too much to even begin to think about.

 _Stop it, Dan. You can’t get into shock that late in the game._ _Screw the Apocalypse. Screw the end of world as you know it, if you can keep safe the ones you truly care about._ _You have_ _Trixie to look after… Think of her._

Right now, protecting my family was my only priority. After crying all my tears on Charlotte’s lifeless body, I couldn't lose anyone else without going insane… I was coming apart at the seams as it was. 

I knew what Chloe’s answer was, to all of that: something along the lines of “Not on my watch. Come _Hell_ or high water.” The fact that the game was played on a much bigger scale than expected didn’t matter to her… She didn’t even care that Lucifer Morningstar was a the wildest card ever thrown into it, ‘cause he was already back to being her partner, a partner she trusted with her life, whatever his past, whatever his role in the Big Picture. He had put himself in harm’s way to get her out of a situation only something _far more_ than human could save her from, as he had probably done more than once in the past... Whoever, whatever he was, she was terrified to lose him, to lose what they had _together_. The way she looked at his injures and desperately clung to his body as if to keep the earth from swallowing him told me that much. 

Now that we knew what lay down there, an entire world was tugging at our souls… Its pull was terrifying, and I was about to leave her and Ella alone with a being who could drag them down to literal Hell with the weight of its existence. 

Was _that_ the Devil’s endgame? Was sticking to the literal Truth his own brand of manipulation? 

If there was one and only “Lucifer Morningstar”, the well-known nightclub owner, musician by night and police consultant by day who had spent years with us on Earth, why would he put that much time and effort into corrupting a few insignificant souls? I bet he had _billions_ to toy with, down there, and ours weren’t that special.

As if he had heard my thoughts ( _Heaven forbid!_ ), he stopped to peek over the feathered joint of a carefully folded wing and pinned me where I was with his flaming gaze. He seemed to ponder whether I was going to do something batshit crazy as soon as I walked out the door, like calling in reinforcements or decorating a shopping cart with scribbled signs (“The Apocalypse is close!”, “Satan is coming to take your souls!”) to push it around a parking lot. I bet chugging cheap wine from a box in a public space would be an unforgivable sin, for him... far worse than taking his name in vain. 

Then, his pensive frown turned into something different: “Take this one, too” he said, pushing the feathers slightly aside to point at something with his wingtip, since both his hands were busy. “He’s not as good at playing dead as he thinks...” 

That “something” was the beefy hitman he had wedged head-first in the stairs’ railing, stripped of his weapons but still clad in full-body tactical gear.

My hand immediately went to the holster, but his moved faster: letting go of the handrail, it grabbed the collar of the (supposedly conscious) offender even before he registered the meaning of his words, or I pointed my gun. With a brutal, unexpected display of strength, he gave the man’s body a good jerk to free it from the bent rods, then lifted it like a garbage bag, barely adjusting his posture to counterbalance the weight.

I heard the man gasp under the black balaclava hiding part of his face; his eyes went wide in an almost comical way. Suspended mid-air, he froze like a kitten picked up by the scruff of its neck, before being thrown unceremoniously in the general direction of the couch, landing on it with such momentum to spare that he made it skid for a good ten inches. The injured angel had preternatural strength and a very good aim: when I rushed there, the couch hadn’t toppled and the big guy was lying face-down on it in a heap of tangled limbs. He was out cold for real, now, not only pretending to be. 

Said wayward angel would have probably rubbed his blood-stained hands with a smirk, if another wave of dizziness hadn’t hit him again (that blood was mostly his, after all), making him flare his wings in a late attempt to maintain some semblance of balance. Both Ella and Chloe fumbled to keep him on his feet, minding the longest feathers of his flailing limbs and trying not to get dragged down by him. The idea of Lucifer Morningstar tumbling down a flight of stairs instead of descending it lithely to make an entrance was even more absurd than the idea of him _not needing to breathe_.

As soon as he grabbed the handrail again, he braced himself to stem the incoming tide of pain: he shouldn’t have moved his wings when he could barely keep them from sweeping the floor and collecting dust like a mop. If not for the lead that was still stuck in them, the neat freak would have probably whined about how filthy, itchy and unsightly they were.

Trixie was fidgeting and seemed very reluctant to leave, but I had almost made it to the front door with her on tow, when I felt her small fingers slip from my palm, and she suddenly bolted toward the stairs. 

Too taken by surprise to be able to stop her, I saw her running up the steps and I froze, horrified, when I realized what was going to happen: a little cannon ball crashing into an injured predator. Lucifer tensed up at the sight of her charging. 

“That’s gonna hurt,” I thought, wincing. However, she didn't barrel straight into him: she skidded to a sudden stop a pair of steps before, then she got close and wrapped her small frame around his legs in a very gentle, careful embrace. 

I held my breath for longer than I probably realized, but apart from keeping his arms hovering awkwardly over her and his wings out of the way, Lucifer didn't pull back or away. While he gaped at the small, whimpering thing clinging to him, the light filling his eyes started to change into something different from Hellfire. It didn't fade nor vanish, quite the contrary: even from the opposite side of the room, it appeared to turn whiter, even more intense, but at the same time softer, strangely alluring, if that made sense. _Angelic_ , maybe? 

"Thank you for saving my mom and me… again," I barely heard Trixie’s words, muffled against his already ruined shirt. 

The fluffy down of his huge wings puffed (Was that the second time?), but that hurt too: he flinched right afterwards, straightening up and crushing the poor handrail again in his vicious grip.

Like me, Chloe noticed the (literal) light shining in her partner’s eyes, when he hesitantly reached out for the child's head and turned to meet the gaze of both her parents, as if asking for permission. I stayed still and she nodded, but he left his hand where it was, hovering in the air: there was dried blood on it. It was Trixie who felt those scary, dangerous claws lingering above her, grabbed them and placed them on her ruffled hair without caring that she was getting touched by Satan _and_ dirty at the same time. After all, Lucifer hadn’t complained about her “sticky fingers getting everywhere”, this time.

She was _blessed_ , more than simply touched, considering how reverent, how "holy" (were there any antonyms befitting the occasion?) that gesture appeared, disturbingly similar to a priest's.

Trixie patiently waited for her friendly monster to start patting awkwardly the crown of her head and left him at it for a few instants, before raising her chin to look at both her mom and Ella: “Is he going to be OK? He’ll get better, will he?” she sniveled. “I’ve patched him once, but it wasn’t that bad…”

Did I want to know what she meant by that? 

He didn’t deny, and he didn’t reassure her either. A missing promise noticed by the two women, too.

 _He never lies, if not by omission, and never gives his word when he’s_ not sure.

When the kid’s eyes kept boring into him and she gave no sign of giving up on getting an answer, he exhaled, then met the gaze of the adults, me included: “If you…” _All_ of you, judging by the silent pledge, “...still want me here, I’ll do my best to stay.”

And that was a deal, if I knew him enough.

He lifted his hand from Trixie’s head. “Now go with your father, little urchin,” he told her, with the earnest tone he always used when he wanted her to pay heed to what he (surely the oldest in the room) said. He had no concept of PG or child-friendly, edited truths: he never talked her down when he meant business, and she loved that he treated her as an equal.

Trixie nodded and pulled back from the embrace, sniffing. She looked at him one last time without saying goodbye, then turned around and came down the stairs.

I reached out and waited for her to come take my hand.

My eyes had kept going back to the man on the coach during the entire exchange, paying attention to any movement and checking the other two guys behind my back now and then to make sure they were still out, but so far there had been no need to knock them down again. They had threatened my baby and they deserved much worse than the spanking our “consultant” had given them. 

My hand hesitated to leave the grip of the holstered gun and go to the only pair of handcuffs available: I wanted to make sure I had Trixie under control before tackling the bigger and badder troublemakers Lucifer had swatted like flies. 

I had no idea how to drag those gorillas down to the floor and away from Chloe’s house, but I didn’t even get the chance to try: as soon as Trixie was at my side, I heard a loud thump coming from the kitchen, together with the sound of shattered glass raining from above. Startled, I spun around in alarm and instantly drew my weapon. The kid gave a high-pitched shriek. There was was a black-clad body sprawled on the floor, now. Not far from it, something that couldn’t be there: a wild-eyed, very distressed John Barrow, gagged and tied to the same chair we had secured him to for the second time (whimpering and smelling of piss) after the Devil had roughed him up. 

What I saw, was him and the armchair getting lifted from the floor like Lucifer had done with Mr. Beefy&Bald before throwing him across the room. What I _didn’t_ see, was the person (creature?) keeping said chair floating mid-air in front of the kitchen’s counter.

Coming straight from the Devil’s lair, the heavy, antique, intricately carved piece of furniture had none other than the Sinnerman’s best hitman sitting on it, and I bet he hadn’t volunteered for that trip. Trixie didn’t know who he was, but meeting his glare, she instantly hid behind me.

The man’s eyes zeroed in on the muzzle of my gun, then on my face, but all he got in return was a noncommittal shrug. _Don’t ask, dude. Dunno. Don’t care._

I was far beyond the denial and the angry stage, but not far into the bargaining or the depressive one, yet. Things had gone too far to make me explode like a pressure cooker with a clogged safety valve… I couldn’t even swear like I used to do as a kid, calling Him names before getting hit by the unforgiving slipper waved by my abuela. Now that I knew that God, Hell, Heaven and all the biblical stuff her slipper had tried to ram into my thick skull were real, I had to find another way to let the steam off, or another religion, provided they weren’t all one and the same. 

 _Do pagan deities count? Has the world been created only 6000 years ago? What about Sumerians? They had their own version of the flood myth… And_ _dinosaurs? Are they really some kind of prank?_

_Focus, damn!_

_Trixie. Gun. 200 lbs of unconscious perp floating in the air right in front of your daughter..._

My head was spinning, and the rest of the body seemed to follow the momentum of my thoughts, ‘cause I found myself back to facing the Devil with a slightly hysterical “What the actual, bloody Hell, dude?” No child-appropriate version for that one… _Sorry, Chloe_. “You have fucking telekinetic powers, too?”

“I hadn’t forgotten about that guy,” he commented, unbothered by the sudden materialization out of thin air of the man who had tried to kill me and the chair we had stolen from the penthouse’s study. 

Trying to outstare an eternal entity was a dumb idea to begin with, but I realized how dumb it was only when I saw that he wasn’t even talking to me. “Thanks for giving a ride to him too,” he added, before making a request with the most affected, fucking _British_ politeness I had ever heard: “Would you mind escorting all those gentlemen to the precinct and make sure they don’t cause a commotion, my dear?” 

No, he definitely wasn’t talking to me. 

As soon as he said that, the man laying on the glass shards was picked up and lifted too. Together with him, the gaping, terrified John Barrow vanished the same way he had suddenly appeared. Same thing for the other two: one popped out of existence from where he was laying crumpled on the couch, the other from where he was stuck between the shelves of the kitchen’s peninsula after being thrown head-first through them.

I heard the fallen angel adding something, but not in English, this time. He dropped the accent and the language altogether: when strange, hypnotic sounds forming strange, hypnotic words came out of his mouth, it was like listening to a completely different music from an unknown culture, played with exotic instruments on impossible chords.

 _‘Cause it’s not a human voice..._ He _’s not human_. _He’s the actual, literal_ Devil _. Maybe it’s true that he can speak all the languages of the world, present and past…_

That brief exchange (that’s what I guessed it was, even though I couldn’t hear the answers) wasn’t meant for human ears. 

“Follow suit, Dan,” he said in the most courteous tone, adding to my confusion. Maybe he didn’t realize I wasn’t fluent in Celestial, or whatever otherworldly language that was. 

“Do I snap my fingers and disappear?” I mumbled, glancing at him from over my shoulder, gun trained on the floor.

“No _pe,_ ” he said, popping the “p”. “You hop on the van parked right outside, get said van into gear and drive to the precinct with those guys heaped in the back. Easy peasy...”

Part of the instructions made sense, part didn’t, but who was I to disagree?

_Trixie. Van. Bring those guys to the precinct._

_How?_

“Don’t worry,” he added, tapping a finger on his lips in a pensive gesture. ”Escorting people is literally the kid’s job…”

And as if to point out how pressing the need to get rid of those thugs was, the front door opened on its own. When it moved on its hinges with no one behind it, Trixie started bouncing in excitement like a rubber ball. The “magic trick” had startled her, at first, as well as Barrow’s ominous glare: I had heard her taking quick, shallow breaths beside me, but they had slowed down as soon as Lucifer had intervened, and his calm voice had instantly soothed her nerves. She seemed to trust him more that she trusted her own father, when it came to sudden, unfathomable dangers: she turned to him instinctively, not caring in the least that his eyes where windows on the fiery pits of the scariest place imaginable, that his skin was licked by flames and his body was fueled by a molten core he could barely contain. He could crush the souls of the living and the dead just raising his _other_ voice, and she considered it “cool”. 

The door was wide open in front of her, and after her really _cool_ friend encouraged her with a nod, Beatrice answered with a solemn “Keep my mom and Ella safe”, then headed straight to the exit. As simple as that. That’s what sitting on the couch to binge-watch horror movies in the company of a demon did to smart kids, especially if said demon threw popcorns at the screen every time a character went down in a one-on-one fight, did something stupid or screamed “Oh my God”. My daughter knew who to trust in dire straits: the strongest.

The second encouraging nod was meant for me. Even from afar, I felt gently nudged toward the exit by the hypnotic gaze of the winged creature, but I resisted that subtle persuasion: looking at me from the top of the stairs, the king of the netherworld wasn’t using the spell of his voice to make us obey, so I called my daughter back, stopping her in her tracks. 

Chloe raised her chin to look him in the eyes, too: she needed to make sure it was safe for us to go outside, and she silently asked an angel of the Lord to _swear_ that it was. 

Without meeting her gaze, God’s son answered her prayer as though he had heard it loud and clear: “You and the spawn will be safe out there, Dan. You have my word,” he said, with such an unchallengeable finality I felt he could have crushed an army under the weight of his will. That definitely wasn’t the Lucifer I knew: he wasn’t wearing his jaunty, clueless, flippant and deceptively innocuous persona, and he was even less him when he mouthed the silent, far more human “Thank you” that helped me make up my mind. It was then and only then that I turned around to follow my daughter.

_You can make it, Dan._

_Can you?_

_The Devil has got it covered. Has he?_

“Wait, Daniel.” His voice (the familiar, unthreatening one) made me linger in the doorway. 

I looked behind my shoulder, and he was still staring at me, too wobbly to stand on those steps much longer, even with Chloe and Ella’s help. 

 _Dear Lord of the whole freaking Multiverse... Your son is_ a mess _. Care to explain?_

“You sure are chatty, aren’t you?” protested my fried brain, trying to ignore the pull of the fallen angel’s voice while mocking his Father. 

He frowned. Had I said it aloud?

I doomed myself to a miserable afterlife by adding: “Isn’t it high time you find yourself a bed?” I could almost see him shivering from where I was.

He harrumphed, pretending he hadn’t been ordered around by another impudent human for three years in a row and quite enjoyed the novelty: “I’m afraid my chatty self isn’t done bothering Your Doucheyness.”

Was that my new moniker?

 _He_ was royalty, not me. The only throne nobody wanted was his, somewhere downstairs.

He took a deep breath: “I’ll never see Charlotte again…”

That froze me to the spot.

“...but you will, in a few decades or so,” he said, with a mix of relief, wistfulness and genuine _care_ that left me speechless, “provided that you behave and leave behind your guilt, shame and failures.” 

What… did he mean?

“I don’t decide where souls are headed. I don’t entrap them or drag them to perdition, contrary to common belief. I have enough work as it is, and I never asked for it in the first place, so believe me when I say I’m _glad_ that Charlotte is in the Silver City, even if it’s a place I’ll never be allowed in again”.

Those words struck me like a physical blow, making me sway. My brain probably went offline for a few instants, until I felt Trixie’s fingers gently slipping into my sweaty palm, after prying open the clenched fist. 

“My brother flew her there, but she _earned_ that first-class ticket. You helped her gaining perspective, starting anew...” I kept on listening to his words like a spell, holding my breath. “You loved her, Dan, and she gave herself a second chance.”

What did that ancient being know about love? He was certainly familiar with all the twisted, corrupted, dirty incarnations of it… Travesties, or worse. But _true, unconditional love_?

For the second time, I forced myself and tried to outstare him, holding that fiery gaze. He was so pale and tense his features seemed carved in white marble; he wasn’t unnaturally still anymore, not like a sculpture. His glazed eyes made him look tired, not ageless, and his bearing made him seem spent, even with the furnace of a star burning under his skin and a black hole hidden even deeper. However, when Chloe tightened her hold around his waist in a silent “I’m here”, the traits of his face softened, his fingers (still sporting something awfully similar to claws) unclenched and his entire frame leaned slightly against hers. The white glow lit again in his eyes, keeping the Hellfire at bay, and the Lightbringer seemed to bash for a few instants in the memory of what he used to be a long, long time ago.

So… he did know.

I let out the breath I was holding, raising a dam to keep the river of tears from pouring over the edge, and turned back toward the kitchen so that nobody could see how broken I was.

“Dad…” I heard my daughter calling me hesitantly. “What happened to Ms. Richards…?” 

I didn’t answer. I just couldn’t, but she read in on my face.

“Make way” was what I said instead, talking to whoever or whatever had been waiting since the King had instructed “the spawn” and me to leave His presence. Something so scary the Devil himself had thought better of letting us see it.

Trixie stayed close to me and to my loaded, barely concealed weapon, following me outside. Again, the door swung shut behind our backs without being touched.

The Devil had sent me on a mission. Did he owe me one? ‘Cause I needed all the divine leverage I could get, even from him, to end up when _she_ was waiting for me. Left to my own devices, I had only one place to go, a dark pit of despair that was far easier to sink into. 

 _“Been there, done that, Dan,”_ I could almost hear the hushed, mellow voice I loved so much purring in my ears.

Apart from the Devil, only my Charlotte could come back from Hell, give it a one-star review and find a more comfortable accommodation to spend the rest of eternity.


	8. Big Guns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “My ride, my rules,” she made clear right from the start. “I’m not a 'civilian consultant’, and this clearly isn’t a vintage Corvette.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Big Guns" by Fleurie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w3D4nGEXIg

 

As the saying went, sunlight was the best disinfectant. It kept the shadows at bay, too, and that was a bonus. Part of that nightmare had followed us outside, but at least we had closed the door behind our backs, leaving the worst of it trapped inside. At least for now.

The Truth had corroded a big chunk of our life, spreading like rust, like a plague, but we couldn’t hate it or fight it: _before_ , things were already different from how we thought them to be... It was only our perspective that had shifted. The poles hadn’t flipped, the North Star (lit and pinned up there by our Celestial friend) still pointed North, and gravity worked like it used to. We could walk on the irritable skin of that planet without the sky falling and squashing us like flies, because nothing had changed, on a cosmic scale.

_Don’t think about that too much, too soon..._

I wrapped my fingers around my daughter’s hand, small and warm, took a deep breath and looked ahead.

_Don’t think about what’s under your feet, Dan. Forget the other planes of existence and all the existential crap you might sink in. Just breathe..._

An old, inconspicuous cutaway van was where Lucifer had said, right in front of the entrance of the small apartment complex, but it hadn’t been “parked” there: the big-ass vehicle had been _dragged_ up the front yard, judging from the obvious skidmarks left on the ground. Like... hauled or pushed with the handbrake still engaged, and not by another vehicle. Probably pushed, considering the strange indentations awfully similar to handprints I could see from where I was.

If I hadn’t been sure about wanting to meet our “escort” face to face before, now I was even less eager to see what he... she… _it_ looked like.

_Fuck it all… What if I just call it in? What if a SWAT team comes and finds the freaking D-E-V-I-L bleeding on my ex-wife’s bed, wings and all?_

All I knew was that I could do without knowing what was going on back there. I had already had a vivid preview of what was lying in wait when I ended down below: the coppery smell filling the nostrils, the flames burning without burning, latching to a wrecked body they couldn’t consume... The real voice of the King of the Damned still rang in my ears and rattled my bones, erupting from a pit of eternal despair and carrying the screams of billions of souls: a terrifying warning for the living.

I stopped walking toward the vehicle and stared at it in a trance. Trixie, still holding my hand, was suddenly pulled back: my arm was pressed against my hip, now, rigid and unyielding. She looked at it knowingly, then lifted her gaze to meet mine, boring into it without saying anything. She didn’t seem to mind the situation as much as I did: her eyes placidly waited for mine to blink, as though she had known the truth for a long time, and she was just waiting for the adults in her life to _finally_ catch up.

I let go of her hand, trying to get a grip on myself.

The NC-17 rated version of our VIP guest from Hell had turned out to be an unnerving ensemble of mismatched features and limbs only Mary Shelley could have thought of. What about the (hopefully) trustworthy demon the King had chosen as our personal bodyguard? Were we making a foray into Lovecraftian territory with an _actual_ , beast-like monster trailing behind us? The invisibility schtick sure was useful for safety reasons, in case another team of Pierce’s goons was lying in wait, but if that thing was as big and scary as I feared it to be, my daughter and I were sure to have a panic attack at the first glimpse of it.

_Can you do this, Dan? For Trixie’s sake?_

Yes, I could. There was no other option on the menu, at the moment. Closing the distance, I grabbed the handle and pulled the door open like a real man, ready to climb on board. No hesitation whatsoever. Then I remembered to let my daughter in first so that she could seat in the middle.

_Don’t freak out. Fake it ‘til you make it._

Mazikeen Smith (“ _Smith”. Really?_ ) had befriended and babysat Trixie since she had moved in and started paying half the rent... I wasn’t sure whether the sexy bartender/ruthless bounty hunter I knew had another face and additional limbs, and if that face looked even remotely human, but her master treated her as an equal... kinda, so I couldn’t imagine her being a lizard-shaped beast with drooling fangs, razor-sharp claws and a spiked tail, not to mention a slimy, poisonous _thing_ with hundreds of eyes looking in different directions. The thing that had pulled the (probably stolen) van in Chloe’s front yard might be just that, though. _“Spare me the truth in that case… Thank you very much,”_ I silently prayed to Whoever was listening.

When the _presence_ suddenly wrenched the opposite door open, I jerked back, hitting the side mirror with the back of my hand when my left arm flailed by reflex. _Ouch._ Only then I realized I hadn’t yetheaved myself up the step and gingerly lowered my ass onto the driver’s seat. I hadn’t even stuck my head in.

Whatever it was, the creature didn’t mind the frozen human staring at the empty space its frame was supposedly occupying: it squeezed itself to climb in, or so it seemed, before plumping down quite ungraciously on the passenger seat. Unlike me, Trixie didn’t even flinch: already sitting in the middle, she raised her chin up a notch, guessing the height of our guest and pretending to meet her gaze with wide eyes and an awed, expectant expression only a child could wear that innocently.

Apparently, our invisible “bodyguard” had checked her over: “Buckle up, kid. It might be a bumpy ride, and I already have enough work as it is.”

My overclocked brain crashed again, blue screen and all. Then rebooted.

_What?_

That wasn’t the opening line I expected from a fearsome demon from Hell. Truth be told, I didn’t expect _it_ (whatever it was) to talk at all.

The _thing…_ the _female_ “it” seemed taken aback by my stunned reaction: “My ride, my rules,” she made clear right from the start. “I’m not a 'civilian consultant’, and this clearly isn’t a vintage Corvette.”

Still struggling with my uncooperative limbs, I grabbed the door’s pillar without letting go of the handle: enough leverage to keep myself from swaying too much. My palms felt numb and sweaty and my heart was beating wildly, like a small, frenzied animal trapped inside my chest. I just couldn’t convince my body to cross that damn threshold.

“What’s with you humans and your total disregard for such a simple rule?” spat out our invisible but obviously irritated escort.

A demon lord or something was scolding me for being reckless. What were we supposed to make of it?

“I haven’t even climbed in, yet…” I weakly pointed out. I considered myself to be a judicious parent… Most of the time, at least, and except for the whole “letting my daughter get close to infernal residents, immortal murderers and supernatural stuff” mess. Hell-forged weapons included, apparently.

Ok… Maybe I _did_ deserve to be scolded.

“The kid did,” countered the female voice, hurrying me up to follow the child’s lead.

I stared again at the empty seat, before adjusting the rearview mirror to look behind and catch my child flashing a big grin toward the other (invisible) adult in the car, showing her the seatbelt she had diligently fastened.

“Don’t you need a booster seat, kid?”

She sounded _really_ unimpressed by how I handled my fatherly duties.

Wait a moment… Who was _her_ father?

I deflated. Better not to know...

“If you can pass for a human like your boss, you should apply for a job in law enforcement,” I dared commenting out loud. I could almost _feel_ her glare, and I squirmed under it.

“You’ve got ants in your pants, do you?” she mocked me. “For your information, Lu’s _not_ my boss.”

“Lu. _”_ Surprisingly, the King of Hell seemed to have more friends than subordinates. "’Lu’ as in Lucifer, King of Hell, fallen Archangel…?”

The fact that God’s Adversary had a free pass to to spend his time on Earth consulting for the LAPD totally made sense, on a cosmic scale... Sure. Since he was no longer busy lighting galaxies and making them spin like giant pinwheels, he had plenty of time to spare, apparently. An entire _eternity_ of it. Had he left hordes of demons to their own devices to flirt with my ex-wife and steal my pudding from the precinct's fridge, so that he could call me "Douche" when I complained about it?

“Sounds cool!” My daughter startled me, bouncing on her seat. “Can I call him like that, Dad?”

 _Oook…_ Time to get in and put that damn car into gear.

“Listen, Trix,” I started, taking my seat beside her and grabbing the wheel with both hands. “What about calling him _…_ ” _How?_ Like she used to before knowing what he was? Sticking to old habits was likely the safest option. “Just choose something _polite_ , ok?” _Something that doesn’t trigger one of his childish tantrums._

“Deal,” she agreed, grinning enthusiastically as if the adventure had just begun.

_Talk about an ominous word… I bet I know whose mouth she heard it from._

“Keys… please,” I reached out, palm upturned, wiggling fingers.

My request was met by our escort with a strange silence, interrupted by an even more preoccupying, muffled thud coming from the back of the vehicle. Had someone regained his senses in the cargo area?

“Since you're a cop, I guess you know how to hot-wire one," said the disembodied voice in a plain, matter-of-fact tone. "My brother can turn anything… _or anyone_ on. But that's his thing, not mine. Different skill set..."

No keys, then. The rightful owner of that stolen vehicle still had them; no luck with the glovebox and the sun visor, either.

Whatever the Devil had called upon to “guard” us wasn’t literally sitting on my shoulder, yet, but it was already suggesting I commit a criminal offence. "I'm a cop and I can _drive_ one…" I didn’t need another acquaintance of his to give me a headache, too. “You know, _stealing_ is generally frowned upon, here on Earth,” I tried reminding her with all the patience I had left.

“As Ella would say, we’re just ‘borrowing it with no deposit fee’.” The utter disregard for human laws was a family trait, apparently. “Isn’t that what cops do when they are in a hurry? 'Cause _we_ _are_ , kinda," she insisted. "As soon as the girls drug or knock their guardian Devil out, there’s no backup team to keep them safe… No matter his strength, not even one of the twins can fend off the bad guys, if he’s passed out.”

“Wait...” A detail stood out. “You know _Ella_? Ella Lopez?”

"Childhood friends," the voice answered, now all bubbling fondness and giggling pride, before adding: " _Her_ childhood." She sounded so fond of her “friend”... Was that reassuring or terrifying?

“My name is Azrael, but my favorite human calls me Rae Rae...”

_And what’s with the cute nicknames?_

For an instant my brain had registered the word “twins”, too, but the news of Ella’s involvement with a Celestial bowled over all the other thoughts, leaving a path of utter destruction in its path. And like a wrecking ball, it swung back to smash whatever was left, hitting me while I was trying to pick up the pieces.

My eyes went wide and my jaw snapped shut, leaving Trixie an opening: “Are all these angel feathers?” she cut in. Struggling with her fastened seatbelt, she was reaching inside a bag I hadn’t noticed, stuffed under the seats between her legs and the demon’s (provided the latter had a regular pair of lower limbs). Rummaging around it with a rustling sound, her small hand emerged from it holding the quill of a delicate, fluffy down feather pinched between her fingers. Dimly lit, it was so white it almost seemed a tear in the very fabric of reality, and when my eyes caught sight of it, everything else blurred at the edges, faded in the background. The small, innocent feather instantly flattened my brain waves: the wrecking ball had been gentle, in comparison.

For a few interminable instants I wasn’t sure that I existed anymore, squeezed in a corner by something far bigger and more relevant, an inflating bubble of raw power and pure, blinding light I couldn’t see, but I could definitely _feel_ , rocking and swamping my soul like a sinking boat. That gigantic wave was bound to send me to the bottom of the sea, but I fought back, gasping under its assault. It wasn’t until I took a deep breath in the real world, that it finally receded, leaving me stranded, and some part of me went with it. I’d never felt such a profound sense of loss, and my daughter too seemed to be under the spell of that small, fluffy sample of Divinity: her eyes were transfixed, her lips slightly parted, her breaths fast and shallow.

“Yep. Angel feathers,” said the now familiar voice right beside her. “Leave it to my brother to throw the most epic pajama party ever, and forget to invite me to the pillow fight,” our escort complained, patting the black trash bag.

“Brother…?”

“Yes. The idiot that Ella and Chloe will hopefully manage to patch up is my big bro,” she said, pointing back to the apartment complex with her thumb.

“Wait… Are you…?”

We could see her thumb, a very normal-looking one, ‘cause we could see _all the rest_ too, now. And just… _wow_. Not what I expected. Not at all.

“Yes, and Lucifer is an angel, too, though he tends to forget it. Now that Mom is gone and Father… well…” she stumbled with her own words, “the twins might be the most powerful beings in existence.”

“ _Twins”. Again._

“So… you are an angel, and you’re telling me to steal someone else’s property...”

“I’m not _telling_ you to do anything” she vehemently protested, before losing momentum and trying to dribble past the tentacles of her own dirty conscience: “I’m just… providing you the means.”

Lucifer’s sister, indeed.

“You humans _love it_ when someone tells you that ‘you’re on a mission’, that you’re ‘doing it for a higher purpose’... don’t you? So just turn the engine on and don’t feel too guilty over it.”

I bore into her eyes, hidden behind nerdy glasses; I almost managed to make her squirm, before rolling my eyes ( _I feel ya, Chloe_ ), reaching under the wheel and doing how I had been told.

Azra- _el_. “Something _of God_ ”, or “ _by God_ ”. The name sounded vaguely familiar. "This ‘City of Angels’ joke is becoming quite too literal…" I mumbled, fiddling with the car’s wires.

“Amenadiel is, too. I guess you've already figured that much,” she confirmed.

The fact that Lucifer's siblings were a mountain-sized black guy and a petite, (kinda) Asian-looking girl made the idea of human "races" sound even dumber.

“How many brothers and sisters are coming to do the Devil’s bidding?” I thought out loud. “Isn’t he supposed to be an outcast?”

That seemed to catch her off-guard.

“Lu has always been the _brightest_ … in every sense,” she said, after carefully pondering the answer. “He made a hullabaloo demanding “free will” when the rest of us didn’t even know what that meant, and Father didn’t take it well. ‘The Devil’,” she made air quotes, “isn’t on speaking terms with the rest of the Host, and Amy is back in the Silver City, so that leaves only me…”

A few more worrying thuds made me turn back. They were louder and insistent, this time.

“Lucifer said that ‘escorting people’ is literally your job… Are you a guardian angel or something?” I pressed on, still busy with the wires.

“Not really. You know, guarding _dead_ people is quite unnecessary... ‘Cause well, they are already dead. I only accompany them to the gates.”

“Gates?”

“Heaven’s. Hell’s...” I lifted my gaze for a moment and saw her pointing her thumb skywards and downwards quite casually, like a spectator of a gladiator fight who was still uncertain about the loser’s fate. How many slaves had she actually seen fight to the death in Roman theaters? She must have watched the last match of every loser the crowd hadn’t spared...

"Wait, wait! What was your name again?" My head jerked up, bumping against the wheel. "Azrael as in… the Angel of Destruction? _That_ angel?" I stared wildly at her totally unthreatening appearance: thick-rimmed glasses (if those weren’t just a fashion statement, I didn’t feel like opening the “angels with physical defects” can of worms yet), a denim miniskirt, black boots and a T-shirt featuring a _winged_ unicorn on a rainbow background that would be perfect for a Pride parade. Lucifer’s sister _and_ Ella’s bestie, indeed.

"I prefer to go with 'Angel of Death': that's my current occupation."

 _Current_.

“So… the Flood, the Great Plague and that kind of stuff…” Capital letters and all.

_At least she isn’t brandishing a scythe..._

“Most pestilences and deluges used to be Mom’s work, before Dad kicked her out, but she wasn’t around anymore in the XIV century. Truth be said, I’m not sure the most recent ones happened for a reason.” She seemed lost in her thoughts for a few instants, before adding: “Worst century ever for me, I must say… with the last one coming a close second. I was so overworked I thought _I_ could die too… and I’m immortal, so that’s saying something.”

I finally managed to turn the engine on. My car thief skills were rusty at best.

“Forgive me if I think that having us escorted by the angel of Death is something only _Lucifer bloody Morningstar_ could have thought of,” I spat out, adding the worst possible imitation of that prick’s British accent. Really, _what the Hell_ was wrong with him? Had he hit his head as a toddler while trying out his feathered appendices? Had he fallen from his high chair while being spoon-fed by his Mom (because he had a mother too, or so he had said) before even falling from the High Heavens?

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a _bad_ idea.”

That gave me pause.

Arms folded on her chest ( _she_ hadn’t fastened her seatbelt, I noticed), the strangely unassuming immortal with cropped hair and unfashionable clothes rested her feet on the dashboard, crossing the ankles with the lug soles of her boots reflected by the windshield.

“My big bro has been living on Earth for eight years straight, and he hasn't caused much trouble, considering his fame…” she mused. “Quite the contrary, actually. Yes, he's been up to some mischief, with all that sex, booze, drugs and rock & roll, but he has also saved this planet once, prevented another Celestial war, brought to justice more bad guys that I can count and protected Chloe and many other humans, even at the expense of his happiness and his own _life_."

My brain went blank: the chaos filling it came to an abrupt halt.

"But if you want to know more, you'll have to ask him explicitly: he never takes credit for what he does, only the blame for what he doesn't…”

“ _And what he does is never enough_ ,” I read in her eyes.

I had a hard time swallowing those words. I just kept my sweaty palms on the wheel and forced myself to put the van into gear. I needed to do something, in order to stay focused: driving, for example.

Her words registered in the background: "Since his Fall, nobody has ever asked him about his reasons, or his feelings… None of his siblings has ever even checked on him, neither did I, and I deeply regret it. The radio silence has been going on for literal _eons_ ," she said. "Celestial beings are different from you..." Clearly a plural pronoun. “They can hold a grudge for much, much longer.”

I turned to look at my daughter for an instant, taking in the unnatural tightness of her face, the distant look. There was something wiser than her age in it, but also sadder.

My hand left the stick to squeeze hers, holding on for as long as it could.

“What if he…?” I finally managed to say under my breath.

“He _mustn’t_.”

Now the angel’s gaze was ancient, forcefully aloof. A glint of steel under the warm brown. “If a son of His died again by human hands, Father might decide the whole Project is not worth tinkering with anymore,” she sentenced. “He might opt for another reset, or _worse_ ”.

And those were the stakes. Higher than any human could imagine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a beta reader, now... Yayyyy! ^.^ Thank you so much, Tavalah! I'm so happy to have you on board!  
> PS: Her ongoing fic ("Halfway Home") is awesome: check it out! https://archiveofourown.org/works/18634351


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